Circumpolar mid-winter thaw and refreeze based on fusion of Metop ASCAT and SMOS, 2011/2012 - 2021/2022 ...

• Main Authors: Bartsch, Annett, Bergstedt, Helena, Pointner, Georg, Muri, Xaver, Rautiainen, Kimmo
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: rain-on-snow; Arctic; microwave; remote sensing; snow; Ice; permafrost
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7575926; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.7575926

Rain-on-Snow (ROS) events occur across many regions of the terrestrial Arctic in mid-winter. Snow pack properties are changing and in extreme cases ice layers form which affect wildlife, vegetation and soils beyond the duration of the event. Active and passive microwave data have been combined to identify events over land North of 65°N (Bartsch et al. 2023). In a first step Metop ASCAT (C-Band radar) was used to identify potential sudden snow structure change. In a second step, results have been masked for coincident observation of wet snow within +- 3 days based on SMOS (derived from Centre Aval de Traitement des Données SMOS (CATDS) level 3 product). Note that the SMOS retrievals can have data gaps due to radio frequency interferences (RFI) what leads to gaps in the event detection. The dataset is structured by centre points of the hexagonal grid of the used Metop ASCAT product (EUMETSAT, approximately 12.5 km nominal resolution). Attributes include point ID (GPI), latitude, longitude and aggregated number ... : The study has received funding under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 869471 (CHARTER). This work was further supported by the European Space Agency CCI+ Permafrost project. ...