Error sources and feasibility for microwave remote sensing of ocean surface salinity

A set of geophysical error sources for the microwave remote sensing of ocean surface salinity have been examined. The error sources include the sea surface temperature, sea surface roughness, atmospheric gases, ionospheric Faraday rotation, and solar and galactic emission sources. It is shown that the brightness temperature effects of a few kelvin can be expected for most of these error sources. The hey correction requirements for accurate salinity measurements are the knowledge accuracy of 0.5 degreesC for the sea surface temperature (SST), 10 mbar for the surface air pressure, 2 degreesC for the surface air temperature, 0.2 degrees accuracy for the Faraday rotation, and Surface roughness equivalent to 0.3 m . s(-1) for the surface wind speed. We suggest the use of several data products for corrections, including the AMSR-type instruments for SST and liquid cloud water, the AMSU-type product for air temperature, the scatterometer products or numerical weather analysis for the air pressure, coincidental radar observations with 0.2 dB precision for surface roughness, and on-board polarimetric radiometer channel for Faraday rotation. The most significant sky radiation is from the sun. A careful design of the antenna is necessary to minimize the leakage of solar radiation or reflection into the antenna sidelobes. The narrow-band radiation from galactic hydrogen clouds with a bandwidth of less than 1 MHz is also significant, but can be corrected with a radio sky survey or minimized with a notched (band-rejection) filter centered at 1.421 GHz. The other planetary and galactic radio sources can also be flagged with a small data loss. We have performed a sampling analysis for a polar-orbiting satellite with 900 km swath width to determine the number of satellite observations over a given surface grid cell during an extended period. Under the assumption that the observations from different satellite passes are independent, it is suggested that an accuracy of 0.1 psu (practical salinity unit) is achievable for global monthly 1 degrees latitude by 1 degrees longitude gridded products.