About the Impact of Missing L1A Data on the Quality of SMOS Brightness Temperature Map Retrieval

ESA's SMOS mission, launched at November 2nd, 2009, is designed to observe two environmentally important variables, soil moisture (SM) over land, and ocean surface salinity (OS) by L-band microwave imaging radiometry. SMOS will also provide information on root-zone soil moisture, vegetation and biomass and contribute to research on the cryosphere. Knowledge of the global distribution of soil moisture and ocean salinity with adequate spatial and temporal sampling is expected to significantly improve weather, climate and extreme-event forecasting. Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity retrieval depends on different parameters in particular the brightness temperature. This paper is concerned with the reconstruction of brightness temperature maps from SMOS interferometric level 1a data. More precisely, we will study the impact of missing data on the quality of reconstruction due to two kinds of failures: correlator/receiver failure.