Assessment of the Stability of Passive Microwave Brightness Temperatures for NASA Team Sea Ice Concentration Retrievals

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Walter N. Meier, J. Scott Stewart
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020
• Subjects: sea ice; passive microwave; remote sensing; Arctic; Antarctic; Science; Q; Antarc*; National Snow and Ice Data Center; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12142197; https://doaj.org/article/7b5d3a40f14c495eb360ed5112bb4488

Gridded passive microwave brightness temperatures (TB) from special sensor microwave imager and sounder (SSMIS) instruments on three different satellite platforms are compared in different years to investigate the consistency between the sensors over time. The orbits of the three platforms have drifted over their years of operation, resulting in changing relative observing times that could cause biases in TB estimates and near-real-time sea ice concentrations derived from the NASA Team algorithm that are produced at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Comparisons of TB histograms and concentrations show that there are small mean differences between sensors, but variability within an individual sensor is much greater. There are some indications of small changes due to orbital drift, but these are not consistent across different frequencies. Further, the overall effect of the drift, while not definitive, is small compared to the intra- and interannual variability in individual sensors. These results suggest that, for near-real-time use, the differences in the sensors are not critical. However, for long-term time series, even the small biases should be corrected for. The strong day-to-day, seasonal, and interannual variability in TB distributions indicate that time-varying algorithm coefficients in the NASA team algorithm would lead to improved, more consistent sea ice concentration estimates.