RETRIEVALS OF ANTARCTIC SEA ICE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES FROM SATELLITE RADAR ALTIMETRY ...

• Main Author: Fons, Steven William
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Digital Repository at the University of Maryland 2021
• Subjects: Remote sensing; Atmospheric sciences; Physical oceanography; altimetry; antarctic; sea ice; Arctic; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; Antarc*; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.13016/ehii-gkia; https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/27994

Satellite observations have been used in sea ice research throughout the last 40+ years and have brought to light substantial changes in the global sea ice coverage. More recently, satellite altimetry has become a valuable tool to estimate the thickness of sea ice - a parameter that plays an important role in the Earth System by moderating heat and moisture fluxes between the polar ocean and atmosphere. While radar altimetry has been effective in providing estimates of Arctic sea ice thickness, the complex snow stratigraphy and uncertain snow depth on Antarctic sea ice have precluded sea ice thickness retrievals in the Southern Ocean, leading to a decade-long gap in the thickness record spanning the lifetime of ESA’s CryoSat-2 satellite. This dissertation will address the need for Antarctic sea ice thickness estimates from CryoSat-2 through the development and assessment of new retrievals of sea ice physical properties that enable the estimation of sea ice thickness.The first part of this dissertation is ...