Conjoint Inversion of Snow Temperature Profiles from Microwave and Infrared Brightness Temperature in Antarctica

The snow temperature above the ice sheet is one of the basic characteristic parameters of the ice sheet, which plays an important role in the study of the global climate. Because infrared and microwaves with different frequencies have different penetration depths in snow, it is possible to retrieve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Zhiwei Chen, Rong Jin, Liqiang Zhang, Ke Chen, Qingxia Li
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023
Subjects:
Q
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15051396
https://doaj.org/article/2a02cd4cd85c4ce9b42590e227f0659e
Description
Summary:The snow temperature above the ice sheet is one of the basic characteristic parameters of the ice sheet, which plays an important role in the study of the global climate. Because infrared and microwaves with different frequencies have different penetration depths in snow, it is possible to retrieve the snow temperature profiles by combining microwave and infrared brightness temperatures. This paper proposes a conjoint inversion algorithm to retrieve snow temperature profiles by combining multi-frequency microwave brightness temperature (BT) with infrared BT, in which different weight functions of microwave BT at different frequencies are adopted, and the atmosphere influence has also been corrected. The snow temperature profile data are retrieved based on AMSR2 microwave BT data and MODIS infrared BT data in 2017 and 2018, which are evaluated by comparing with the measured snow temperature at Dome-C station. The results confirm that the inverted snow temperature profiles are consistent with the field observation data from the Dome-C station. Multi-frequency microwave brightness temperature can be used to invert the snow temperature profiles; however, the inverted snow surface temperature is more accurate by combining the infrared BT with the microwave BT in the conjoint inversion algorithm.