Pi-MEP Salinity – an ESA-NASA Platform for sustained satellite surface salinity validation

The Pilot Mission Exploitation Platform (Pi-MEP) for Salinity (www.salinity-pimep.org) has been released operationally in 2019 to the broad oceanographic community, in order to foster satellite sea surface salinity validation and exploitation activities.

Specifically, the Platform aims at enhancing salinityvalidation, by allowing systematic inter-comparison of various EO datasets with a broad suite of in-situ data, and also at enabling oceanographic process studies by capitalizing on salinity data in synergy with additional spaceborne estimates.

 

Despite Pi-MEP was originally conceived as an ESA initiative to widen the uptake of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission data over ocean, a project partnership with NASA was devised soon after the operational deployment, and an official collaboration endorsed within the ESA-NASA Joint Program Planning Group (JPPG).

 

The Salinity Pi-MEP has therefore become a reference hub for SMOS, SMAP and Aquarius satellite salinity missions, which are assessed in synergy with additional thematic datasets (e.g., precipitation, evaporation, currents, sea level anomalies, ocean color, sea surface temperature). 

Match-up databases of satellite/in situ (such as Argo, TSG, moorings, drifters) data and corresponding validation reports at different spatiotemporal scales are systematically generated; furthermore, recently-developed dedicated tools allow data visualization, metrics computation and user-driven features extractions.

 

The Platform is also meant to monitor salinity in selected oceanographic “case studies”, ranging from river plumes monitoring to SSS characterization in challenging regions, such as high latitudes or semi-enclosed basins.

 

The two Agencies are currently collaborating to widen the Platform features on several technical aspects - ranging from a triple-collocation software implementation to a sustained exploitation of data from the SPURS-1/2 campaigns. In this context, an upgrade of the satellite/in-situ match-up methodology has been recently agreed, resulting into a redefinition of the validation criteria that will be subsequently implemented in the Platform.

 

A further synthesis of the three satellites salinity algorithms, models and auxiliary data handling is at the core of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) on Salinity and of ESA-NASA further collaboration.