Snow thickness retrieval using SMOS satellite data: Comparison with airborne IceBridge and buoy measurements

Abstract:

The passive microwave mission SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) provides daily coverage of the polar regions and its data have been used to retrieve thin sea ice thickness up to about one meter. In addition, there has been an attempt to retrieve snow thickness over thick Arctic multi-year ice, which is a crucial parameter for the freeboard-based estimation of (thick) sea ice thickness from lidar and radar altimetry. SMOS provides measurements at a frequency of 1.4 GHz (L-band) at horizontal and vertical polarization for a range of incidence angles (0 to 60°). The retrieval of ice or snow parameters from SMOS measurements is based on an emission model that describes the 1.4 GHz brightness temperature of (snow-covered) sea ice as a function of the ice and snow thicknesses and the permittivities of these media, which are mainly determined by ice temperature and salinity and snow density, respectively. In the first attempts to retrieve snow thickness from SMOS data, these parameters were assumed to be constant in the emission model, and the resulting maps were compared with airborne ice and snow thickness measurements taken during NASA's Operation IceBridge mission in spring 2012.

The present approach to produce SMOS snow thickness maps is more elaborate. For example, available information on the ice surface temperature from MODIS (MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite images or from the IceBridge campaign itself are used, and the ice in the retrieval model is described by temperature and salinity profiles instead of using bulk values. As a first step we have produced (winter/spring) snow thickness maps of the Arctic, from 3-day-averages up to monthly means, using the available SMOS data from 2010 on. Here, we show how our spatial snow thickness distributions compare with IceBridge campaign data in the western Arctic from spring 2011 to 2015. In addition, we show how the temporal evolution of SMOS-retrieved snow thickness compares with snow buoy data. Although the results from these comparisons have to be interpreted cautiously, mainly due to the different spatial resolutions of SMOS (35-50 km footprint) and the smaller-scale airborne (and buoy) data, SMOS and IceBridge often agree as to where we find transitions from large-scale areas of very thin snow to areas predominantly covered by thicker snow.