Satellite Microwave Radar Observations . . .

• Main Author: Drinkwater
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1996
• Subjects: Antarctic; Arctic; Antarc*; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.3997; http://polar.jpl.nasa.gov/Publications/BAMS_Cancun.pdf

INTRODUCTION Since 1991 a number of international satellites have collected microwave radar image data over Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. The recent successful launch of the ADEOS I satellite, with the NASA NSCAT instrument, also enables additional weather-independent global sea-ice radar data to be acquired and archived in the US. With its pair of 500 km-wide parallel swathes, this radar scatterometer is capable of acquiring data over the entire polar oceans in less than 1 day. The advantages which scatterometer data offer over 25 km resolution, shorter-wavelength passive microwave instruments such as SSM/I are that sea-ice data retrieval is not limited by atmospheric water vapor content, and also that they approach a higher resolution (~8-10 km at high latitudes) with new imaging techniques (Drinkwater et al., 1993). Together with complementary high resolution (100 m) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) microwave imaging, these frequent repeat data provide a powerful tool for add