Towards improving radiometry-derived snow depths with SNOWPACK and SMRT
- 1Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London, UK
- 2National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, Boulder CO, USA
- 3Centre for Earth Observation Science, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
- 4Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO, USA
The depth of overlying snow on sea ice exerts a strong control on atmosphere-ocean heat and light flux and introduces major uncertainties in the remote sensing of sea ice thickness. Satellite-mounted microwave radiometers have enabled retrieval of snow depths over first year ice, but such retrievals are subject to a wide margin of error due to spatial variation in snow stratigraphy and roughness.
Here we model the microwave signature of snow on sea ice using a recently released sea ice variant of the snowpack evolution model, SNOWPACK (Wever et al., 2020). By advecting parcels of sea ice using ice motion vectors and exposing them to the relevant atmospheric forcing using ERA5 reanalysis, we model the accumulation of snow and the development of snowpack stratigraphy.
We then pass these modelled snowpacks to the Snow Microwave Radiative Transfer model (Picard et al., 2018) to estimate their microwave emission characteristics. By using relationships from the literature relating the ratios of the 37GHz and 19GHz channels, we calculate whether the traditional “gradient ratio” method (Markus and Cavalieri, 1998) over- or underestimates the depth of snow at a particular point based on our modelling. We then adjust the observed gradient ratio based on the model results in an attempt to better characterise snow depths.
References
Wever, Nander, et al. "Version 1 of a sea ice module for the physics-based, detailed, multi-layer SNOWPACK model." Geoscientific Model Development 13.1 (2020): 99-119.
Picard, Ghislain, Melody Sandells, and Henning Löwe. "SMRT: An active–passive microwave radiative transfer model for snow with multiple microstructure and scattering formulations (v1. 0)." Geoscientific Model Development 11.7 (2018): 2763-2788.
Markus, Thorsten, and Donald J. Cavalieri. "Snow depth distribution over sea ice in the Southern Ocean from satellite passive microwave data." Antarctic sea ice: physical processes, interactions and variability 74 (1998): 19-39.
How to cite: Mallett, R., Stroeve, J., Tsamados, M., and Liston, G.: Towards improving radiometry-derived snow depths with SNOWPACK and SMRT, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19061, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19061, 2020
