SMOS L2 full reprocessing

Relaxed masking policy to show more data

2023/10/23 12:43:15 GMT

Last week we published SMOS L2 wind data that we processed using a nominal masking policy: we only included pixels flagged as "good" or "fair" quality, but doing so removed a lot of pixels on the outer areas of the swaths, around islands, in a rather large buffer following the coastline and when crossing the path of a storm.

Storm trajectory and wind radii from IBTrACS and SMOS L2 wind data with the nominal masking policy

We received feedback stating that most pixels flagged as "poor" quality can still offer insightful information in the aforementioned cases and could therefore be of interest, at least for visualisation purposes. The tradeoff is that pixels with really poor quality are also shown, this is notably the case with the pixels closer to the coastline or over ice.

Storm trajectory and wind radii from IBTrACS and SMOS L2 wind data with the relaxed masking policy
(https://odl.bzh/Iaa2cgLj)

The complete archive (from 2010 until now) has been reprocessed with the relaxed masking policy.

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