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Estimating snow depth over Arctic sea ice from calibrated dual-frequency radar freeboards

Lawrence, IR; Tsamados, MC; Stroeve, JC; Armitage, TWK; Ridout, AL; (2018) Estimating snow depth over Arctic sea ice from calibrated dual-frequency radar freeboards. The Cryosphere , 12 (11) pp. 3551-3564. 10.5194/tc-12-3551-2018. Green open access

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Abstract

Snow depth on sea ice remains one of the largest uncertainties in sea ice thickness retrievals from satellite altimetry. Here we outline an approach for deriving snow depth that can be applied to any coincident freeboard measurements after calibration with independent observations of snow and ice freeboard. Freeboard estimates from CryoSat-2 (Ku band) and AltiKa (Ka band) are calibrated against data from NASA's Operation IceBridge (OIB) to align AltiKa with the snow surface and CryoSat-2 with the ice–snow interface. Snow depth is found as the difference between the two calibrated freeboards, with a correction added for the slower speed of light propagation through snow. We perform an initial evaluation of our derived snow depth product against OIB snow depth data by excluding successive years of OIB data from the analysis. We find a root-mean-square deviation of 7.7, 5.3, 5.9, and 6.7 cm between our snow thickness product and OIB data from the springs of 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 respectively. We further demonstrate the applicability of the method to ICESat and Envisat, offering promising potential for the application to CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2, which launched in September 2018.

Type: Article
Title: Estimating snow depth over Arctic sea ice from calibrated dual-frequency radar freeboards
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.5194/tc-12-3551-2018
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-3551-2018
Language: English
Additional information: © Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062936
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