Correction of Aquarius Sea Surface Salinity in the East Sea

Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) observations from the Aquarius satellite in the East Sea show large systematic biases mainly caused by the surrounding lands and Radio Frequency Interferences (RFI) along the descending orbits on which the satellite travels from the Asian continent to the East Sea. To develop a technique for correcting the systematic biases unique to the East Sea, the least square regression between in situ observations of salinity and the reanalyzed salinities by HYCOM is first performed. Then monthly mean reanalyzed salinities fitted to the in situ salinities are compared with monthly mean Aquarius salinities to calculate mean biases in 1o × 1o boxes. Mean biases in winter (December−March) are found to be considerably larger than those in other seasons possibly caused by the inadequate correction of surface roughness in the sea surrounded by the land, and thus the mean bias corrections are performed using two bias tables. Large negative biases are found in the area near the coast of Japan and in the areas with islands. In the northern East Sea, data sets using the ascending orbit only (SCIA) are chosen for correction because of large RFI errors on the descending orbit (SCID). Resulting mean biases between the reanalysis salinities fitted to in situ observations and the bias corrected Aquarius salinities are less than 0.2 psu in all areas. The corrected mean salinity distributions in March and September demonstrate marked improvements when compared with mean salinities from the World Ocean Atlas (WOA [2005−2012]). In September, salinity distributions based on the corrected Aquarius and on the WOA (2005−2012) show similar distributions of Changjiang Diluted Water (CDW) in the East Sea.