Jena 2013 – scientific programme

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UP: Fachverband Umweltphysik

UP 13: Methoden - Fernerkundung, Messverfahren und Datenauswertung

UP 13.3: Talk

Thursday, February 28, 2013, 09:45–10:00, HS 5

Microwave Remote Sensing of Sea Ice Thickness - Retrieval and Validation — •Marcus Huntemann and Georg Heygster — Institut für Umweltphysik, Universiät Bremen

Sea ice has been requested by WMO (World Meteorological Organization) as one of the essential variables for climate and weather modeling and prediction. The sea ice concentration has been observed since over three decades by satellite based microwave radiometers, while obtaining the sea ice thickness is more complicated. The SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) satellite, operating since January 2010, works at 1.4 GHz (L-band), the lowest microwave frequency currently used in satellite remote sensing. SMOS employs a aperture synthesis technique and observes a single location at different incident angles during one overflight with a spatial resolution of about 50 km. By comparison of thermodynamic ice growth data with SMOS brightness temperatures in the Kara Sea we found a high correlation of sea ice thickness with the intensity and an anti correlation of sea ice thickness with the difference of horizontally and vertically polarized brightness temperatures. From that we developed an empirical retrieval algorithm for the sea ice thickness of up to 50 cm during the freeze-up period. In the validation against in-situ measurements, satellite data and regional models our SMOS sea ice thickness retrieval achieves high correlations in several different regions.