Launched in November 2009, the ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is now routinely providing soil moisture and ocean salinity data to scientific users. Retrieving ocean salinity from SMOS observed brightness temperatures is a challenging task, due the sensitivity of brightness temperature to ocean salinity, sea surface temperature and roughness, which present error sources for the ocean salinity retrieval. Hence temporal and spatial averaging is required as well as excellent stability of the SMOS on-board radiometer, MIRAS. This session will provide an update on the status and improvements of the SMOS Level 2 ocean salinity data retrievals, and in particular invites contributions on

i. the validation of the SMOS ocean salinity data using in-situ measurements,
ii. investigating the suitability of SMOS ocean salinity data for oceanographic applications on different temporal and spatial scales,
iii. improvement of the level 2 salinity retrieval and the development of Level 3 ocean salinity data products,
iv. how to assimilate SMOS ocean salinity data into ocean models, including the representativeness of SMOS data for salinity at deeper ocean layers, and
v. data fusion and harmonisation techniques for the generation of long term ocean salinity data sets.