Remote Sensing of Snow-covered Sea Ice with Ultra-wideband Airborne Radars

Abstract:

The extent and thickness of sea ice and snow play a critical role in the Earth’s climate system. Both sea ice and snow have high albedo and control the heat exchange between the atmosphere and ocean and atmosphere and land. In terms of hydrology, the presence of sea ice and snow modulates the flow and the salinity of ocean water. This in turn can modify the weather patterns around the globe. Understanding the formation, coverage and the properties of sea ice and snow are important for both short-term and long-term climate modeling.

The advancements in high-frequency electronics and digital signal processing enabled the development of ultra-wideband radars by the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) for airborne measurements of snow and ice properties over large areas. CReSIS recently developed and deployed two ultra-wideband airborne radars, namely the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder/Imager (MCoRDS/I) and the Snow Radar. The MCoRDS/I is designed to operate over the frequency range of 180-450 MHz for sounding land ice and imaging its ice-bed interface. We also took advantage of the deployment to explore the potential of UWB MCoRDS/I in sounding sea ice and collected data on flight lines flown as part of NASA Operation IceBridge mission during Spring 2015. Preliminary results show we sounded sea ice under favorable conditions. We will perform detailed processing and analysis of data over the next few months and we will compare results obtained are compared with existing altimetry-derived data products. The new snow radar, on the other hand, operating from 2 to 18 GHz, was deployed on the NRL Twin Otter aircraft in Barrow, AK. It was shown to have a vertical resolution of down to 1.5 cm which opens up the potential for thin snow measurement on both sea ice and land. Both of these new radars will be further optimized for future airborne missions to demonstrate their capabilities for sea ice and snow measurements. We will also show new technical advances in hardware and signal processing techniques useful for airborne measurements of snow and sea ice.