Quality Control Plan for Brightness Temperature Modelling

This document outlines the current quality control procedures applied within the European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) brightness temperature (Tb) monitoring run routinely at the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). It also proposes possible future enhancements to this strategy. Effective quality control is important to avoid poor quality data skewing the monitoring statistics and in a possible future assimilation configuration will be important to avoid poor quality data contributing to degraded analyses and forecasts.