Simulated Geophysical Noise in Sea Ice Concentration Estimates of Open Water and Snow-Covered Sea Ice

Sea ice concentration algorithms using brightness temperatures ( $T_{B}$ ) from satellite microwave radiometers are used to compute sea ice concentration ( $c_{\text{ice}}$ ), sea ice extent, and generate sea ice climate data records. Therefore, it is important to minimize the sensitivity of $c_{\te...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Rasmus T. Tonboe, Vishnu Nandan, Marko Makynen, Leif Toudal Pedersen, Stefan Kern, Thomas Lavergne, Johanne Oelund, Gorm Dybkjaer, Roberto Saldo, Marcus Huntemann
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2022
Subjects:
Microwave radiometry
sea ice concentration
sea ice emission modeling
Ocean engineering
TC1501-1800
Geophysics. Cosmic physics
QC801-809
Arctic
Antarctic
The Antarctic
Antarc*
Sea ice
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2021.3134021
https://doaj.org/article/3cb28648ebe1409b9e8b74ddd2cbd710
Description
Summary:Sea ice concentration algorithms using brightness temperatures ( $T_{B}$ ) from satellite microwave radiometers are used to compute sea ice concentration ( $c_{\text{ice}}$ ), sea ice extent, and generate sea ice climate data records. Therefore, it is important to minimize the sensitivity of $c_{\text{ice}}$ estimates to geophysical noise caused by snow/sea ice thermal microwave emission signature variations, and presence of WV and clouds in the atmosphere and/or near-surface winds. In this study, we investigate the effect of geophysical noise leading to systematic $c_{\text{ice}}$ biases and affecting $c_{\text{ice}}$ standard deviations (STD) using simulated top of the atmosphere $T_{B}$ s over open water and 100% sea ice. We consider three case studies for the Arctic and the Antarctic and eight different $c_{\text{ice}}$ algorithms, representing different families of algorithms based on the selection of channels and methodologies. Our simulations show that, over open water and low $c_{\text{ice}}$ , algorithms using gradients between V-polarized 19-GHz and 37-GHz $T_{B}$ s show the lowest sensitivity to the geophysical noise, while the algorithms exclusively using near-90-GHz channels have by far the highest sensitivity. Over sea ice, the atmosphere plays a much smaller role than over open water, and the $c_{\text{ice}}$ STD for all algorithms is smaller than over open water. The hybrid and low-frequency (6 GHz) algorithms have the lowest sensitivity to noise over sea ice, while the polarization type of algorithms has the highest noise levels.

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