A sea-ice thickness retrieval model for 1.4 GHz radiometry and application to airborne measurements over low salinity sea-ice

In preparation for the European Space Agency's (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, we investigated the potential of L-band (1.4 GHz) radiometry to measure sea-ice thickness. Sea-ice brightness temperature was measured at 1.4 GHz and ice thickness was measured along nearly coincident flight tracks during the SMOS Sea-Ice campaign in the Bay of Bothnia in March 2007. A research aircraft was equipped with the L-band Radiometer EMIRAD and coordinated with helicopter based electromagnetic induction (EM) ice thick- ness measurements. We developed a three layer (ocean-ice-atmosphere) di- electric slab model for the calculation of ice thickness from brightness temperature. The dielectric properties depend on the relative brine volume which is a function of the bulk ice salinity and temperature. The model calculations suggest a thickness sensitivity of up to 1.5 m for low-salinity (multi-year or brackish) sea-ice. For Arctic first year ice the modelled thickness sensitivity is less than half a meter. It reduces to a few centimeters for temperatures approaching the melting point. The campaign was conducted under unfavorable melting conditions and the spatial overlap between the L-band and EM-measurements was relatively small. Despite these dis- advantageous conditions we demonstrate the possibility to measure the sea-ice thickness with the certain limitation up to 1.5 m. The ice thickness derived from SMOS measurements would be complementary to ESA's CryoSat-2 mission in terms of the error characteristics and the spatiotemporal cov- erage. The relative error for the SMOS ice thickness retrieval is expected to be not less than about 20%.

• Publication year

  2009

• Venue

  The Cryosphere

• Publication date

  2009-11-01

• Fields of study

  Engineering, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.5194/TC-4-583-2010
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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