Greifswald 2024 – scientific programme

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UP: Fachverband Umweltphysik

UP 5: Cryosphere and Arctic Oceans

UP 5.3: Talk

Wednesday, February 28, 2024, 11:45–12:00, ELP 6: HS 4

Snowdepth on Antarctic Sea Ice Retrieved from Microwave Satellite Data — •Christian Melsheimer and Gunnar Spreen — Institute of Environmental Physics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Snow on sea ice has a large effect on heat and energy fluxes because it is a strong thermal insulator and is very bright; a thick snow layer even influences the freeboard of the underlying ice. Therefore, comprehensive and up-to-date satellite-based data about the variable snow layer on sea ice are very much sought after. Until now, more research has gone into snow on Arctic sea ice, and also the amount of direct snow measurement data from the Arctic is much larger than the amount of data from the Antarctic.

We have applied an existing snow depth retrieval for Arctic sea ice without modifications to Antarctic sea ice. This retrieval method uses the brightness temperatures at 10 and 17 GHz from the satellite radiometer AMSR2 (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer, on the Japanese Satellite GCOM-W). We have compared snow depth data on Antarctic sea ice thus retrieved with airborne snow depth measurements from two flight campaigns (Operation Ice Bridge, OIB). This showed that the satellite retrieval produces meaningful results but strongly underestimates the snow depth. Therefore, we now train the retrieval method with Antarctic snow depth measurements, preferably from one of the already mentioned OIB flights and compare the results with independent snow depth measurements.

Keywords: Snow depth; Sea ice; Antarctic; Remote sensing