C-BAND SEA ICE MODEL

• Main Authors: Ad Stoffelen, Jeroen Verspeek, Siebren De Haan
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.380.7875; http://earth.esa.int/workshops/salzburg04/papers_posters/3A5_stoffel_670.pdf

The ERS scatterometer backscatter measurement space has proven to be extremely useful for the derivation of a Geophysical Model Function (GMF) over water surfaces and for tuning the GMF inversion algorithm to produce winds. Over other types of surface, a similar analysis methodology may be performed. In this paper we use the ERS scatterometer measurement space to derive an accurate C-band ice model. In the measurement space sea ice points lie close to a line, indicating a single geophysical parameter dependency. The C-band sea ice GMF can thus be modelled by a dependency on incidence angle and one geophysical parameter, called a. The sea ice GMF is constrained to fit the measurement space sea line for all across-swath wind vector cells. A quasi-linear incidence angle (θ) dependency results. Retrieval of the ice parameter a is carried out by projecting the measured backscatter triplet onto the ice line. The in the sea ice community commonly-used σ 0 (θ = 40 o) is then equal to GMF(a, θ = 40 o). Since wind and ice points can generally be well discriminated in measurement space, we use the sea ice model and inversion for water/ice discrimination in scatterometer products. 1.