Assimilation of SMOS Sea Surface Salinity in the Regional Ocean Model for South China Sea

Ocean salinity has an important impact on marine environment simulations. The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is the first satellite in the world to provide large-scale global salinity observations of the oceans. Salinity remote sensing observations in the open ocean have been successfully applied in data assimilations, while SMOS salinity observations contain large errors in the coastal ocean (including the South China Sea (SCS)) and high latitudes and cannot be effectively applied in ocean data assimilations. In this paper, the SMOS salinity observation data are corrected with the Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN) in data assimilation preprocessing, which shows that after correction, the bias and root mean square error (RMSE) of the SMOS sea surface salinity (SSS) compared with the Argo observations can be reduced from 0.155 PSU and 0.415 PSU to −0.003 PSU and 0.112 PSU, respectively, in the South China Sea. The effect is equally significant in the northwestern Pacific region. The preprocessed salinity data were applied to an assimilation in a coastal region for the first time. The six groups of assimilation experiments set in the South China Sea showed that the assimilation of corrected SMOS SSS can effectively improve the upper ocean salinity simulation.