Brightness Temperature Maps Retrieval for the SMOS Space Mission: Regularized Inversion and Bias Reduction

Synthetic aperture imaging radiometers (SAIR) are powerful sensors for high-resolution observations of the Earth at low microwaves frequencies. Within this context, the European Space Agency is currently developing the SMOS mission devoted to the monitoring of soil moisture and ocean salinity at global scale from L-band space borne radiometric observations obtained with a two-dimensional interferometer. This contribution is concerned with the reconstruction of radiometric brightness temperature maps from interferometric measurements provided by SMOS.