Evaluation of the most recent reprocessed SMOS soil moisture products: Comparison between SMOS level 3 V246 and V272

International audience; Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite has been providing surface soil moisture (SSM) and ocean salinity (OS) retrievals at L-band for five years (2010–2014). During these five years, the SSM retrieval algorithm i.e. the L-MEB (L-Band Microwave Emission of the Biosphere [1] model has been progressively improved and hence results in different versions of the SMOS SSM products. This study aims at evaluating the last improvement in the SSM products of the most recent SMOS level 3 (SMOSL3) reprocessing (SMOSL3_2.72) vs. an earlier version (SMOSL3_246). Correlation, bias, Root Mean Square Difference (RMSD) and unbiased RMSD (unbRMSD) were used as perform…