Review of recent technical accomplishments of Aquarius - NASA's first global sea surface salinity mission

Abstract

Launched 10 June 2011, the NASA's Aquarius instrument onboard the Argentine built and managed Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC-D) has been tirelessly observing the open oceans, confirming and adding new knowledge to the not so vast measured records of the Earth's global oceans. This paper reviews the data collected to date, findings, challenges and future work that is at hand for the sleepless oceanographers, hydrologists and climate scientists. Although routine data is being collected, a snapshot is presented from almost 2-years of flawless operations showing new discoveries and possibilities of lot more in the future. Repetitive calibration and validation of measurements from Aquarius continue together with comparison of the data to the existing array of Argo temperature/salinity profiling floats, measurements from the recent Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS) in-situ experiment and research, and to the data collected from the European Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. This aids in the optimization of computer model functions to improve the basic understanding of the water cycle over the oceans and its ties to climate. The Aquarius mission operations team also has been tweaking and optimizing algorithms, reprocessing data as needed, and producing salinity movies that has never been seen before. On a similar note and news, the Argentine SAC-D end, the international partners of this mission (Argentina, Italy, France and Canada) have been mining on data from their 7 other instruments on-board this 1.5 Ton satellite. A brief overview of their findings will also be covered in this paper.