The European Space Agency will launch the first salinity satellite for remotely sensing the global soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) at a sun-synchronous orbit in 2009. One of the payloads on the satellite is a synthetic aperture microwave radiometer (MIRAS), which is an innovative instrument designed as a two-dimensional (2D) interferometer for acquiring brightness temperature (TB) at L-band (1.4 GHz). MIRAS allows measuring TB at a series of incidences for full polarizations. As the satellite travels, a given location within the 2D field of view is observed from different incidence angles. The authors develop a new scheme to retrieve the sea-surface salinity (SSS) from SMOS's TB at multi-incidence angles in a pixel, utilizing the properties of emissivity changing with incidence angles. All measurements of a given Stokes parameter in a pixel are first fitted to incidence angles in three order polynomial, and then the smoothed data are used for retrieving the SSS. The procedure will remove the random noise in TB greatly. Furthermore, the new method shows that the error in retrieved SSS is very sensitive to the system biases in the calibrated TB of the sensor, but the error in the retrieval is also a system bias, which can be corrected by post-launch validation. Therefore, this method may also serve as a means to evaluate the calibration precision in TB.
Permittivity of a sea foam layer is very important in investigating ocean brightness temperature model. At microwave frequency, the Rayleigh method is developed to estimate the effective permittivity of the sea foam layer. To simplify the tedious calculation of sea foam effective permittivity at L band （1.4GHz）, Pade＇ approximation is adopted to fit the sea foam effective permittivity computed by the Rayleigh method. With this fitting formula, a new brightness temperature model of sea foam layer defined by certain geophysical parameters, such as air volume fraction （AVF）, sea surface temperature （SST）, sea surface salinity （SSS） and thickness of foam layer d, is given. Furthermore, the sensitivities of the brightness temperature model to SST, SSS, d and AVF of a sea foam layer at L band are discussed. The sensitivities are ranked from most to least in the order： （1） d; （2） AVF; （3） SSS; （4） SST. This result indicates that the measurement errors old and AVF have significant impacts on the retrievals of SSS and SST. With the experimental brightness temperature data, the SSS and AFV are retrieved by cost function.
