| Summary: | Sea ice thickness is essential for climate studies and numerical weather prediction. Radar altimetry has provided sea ice thickness measurement since the launch of ERS-1 and currently through CryoSat-2, but uncertainty arises from interactions between the emitted signal and snow cover on the ice surface. Snow and ice have been shown to affect the altimeter waveform mainly due to their microstructure properties, surface roughness and salinity. Therefore, modelling the scattering of the electromagnetic waves with the snowpack and ice is necessary to retrieve the sea ice thickness accurately. The Snow Microwave Radiative Transfer (SMRT) model can be used to simulate both snow cover and ice with salinity, which makes it suitable for modelling the altimeter waveform echo from the snow-covered sea ice. This work focuses on measurements made as part of the Altimetric Ku-band Radar Observations Simulated with SMRT (AKROSS) project. The AKROSS project was designed to provide the first evaluation of the SMRT model in altimeter mode for snow on sea ice. The purpose of this presentation is to evaluate SMRT in altimeter mode over sea ice by 1) evaluating the overall fit of the waveform with observations of CryoSat-2, 2) investigating the sensitivity of the Ku/Ka band for the CRISTAL mission of the European Space Agency (ESA).
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