Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS)/CryoSat-2 Sea Ice Thickness/Volume Data ...

• Main Authors: Ricker, Robert, Hendricks, Stefan, Kaleschke, Lars, Tian-Kunze, Xiangshan, King, Jennifer, Haas, Christian
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: NSF Arctic Data Center 2024
• Subjects: Arctic Report Card 2023; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18739/a2t43j47x; https://arcticdata.io/catalog/view/doi:10.18739/A2T43J47X

Sea-ice thickness on a global scale is derived from different satellite sensors using independent retrieval methods. Due to the sensor and orbit characteristics, such satellite retrievals differ in spatial and temporal resolution as well as in the sensitivity to certain sea-ice types and thickness ranges. Satellite altimeters, such as CryoSat-2 (CS2), sense the height of the ice surface above the sea level, which can be converted into sea-ice thickness. Relative uncertainties associated with this method are large over thin ice regimes. Another retrieval method is based on the evaluation of surface brightness temperature (TB) in L-band microwave frequencies (1.4 Giga Hertz) with a thickness-dependent emission model, as measured by the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite. While the radiometer-based method looses sensitivity for thick sea ice (> 1 meter(m)), relative uncertainties over thin ice are significantly smaller than for the altimetry-based retrievals. In ...