Multi-Frequency and multi-Satellite Approaches for enhanced snow, ice and elevation in the polar oceans: updates from Polar+ and Cryosat+ ESA projects

Multi-Frequency and multi-Satellite Approaches for enhanced snow, ice and elevation in the polar oceans: updates from Polar+ and Cryosat+ ESA projects

We propose new methods for multi-frequency snow, ice and sea surface retrievals building on the legacy of the Arctic+ Snow project where we developed two products: the dual-altimetry Snow Thickness (DuST) and the Snow on Drifting Sea Ice (SnoDSI) and on the recent ESA projects: Polar+ Snow on Sea Ice and CryoSat+ Antarctic Ocean.  

The primary objective of the Polar+ Snow of Sea Ice ESA project is to investigate multi-frequency approaches to retrieve snow thickness over all types of sea ice surfaces in the Arctic and provide a state-of-the-art snow product. Our approach follows ESA ITT recommendations to prioritise satellite-based products and will benefit from the recent "golden era in polar altimetry" with the successful launch of the laser altimeter ICESat-2 in 2018 complementing data provided by the rich fleet of radar altimeters, CryoSat-2, Sentinel-3 A/B, AltiKa. Our primary objective is to produce an optimal snow product over the recent "operational" period. This will be complemented by additional snow products covering a longer periods of climate relevance and making use of historical altimeters (Envisat, ICESat-1) and passive microwave radiometers for comparison purposes (SMOS, AMSRE, AMSR-2).

The CryoSat+ Antarctic Ocean ESA project aims at exploring alternative methods to derive sea ice thickness and sea surface height measurements over the Antarctic Ocean. The potential of CryoSat-2 to retrieve information on mesoscale features over the area is also explored.  Exciting new results include (i) a detailed inter-comparison of all processing options along-track; (ii) novel optimal interpolation techniques; (iii) dual frequency approaches tested in the SO for snow retrieval; (iv) Lagrangian drift snow products for the SO. This work is supporting the progress of the gridded product development during. Complementing this project, a new ESA project looking at tides in the Southern Ocean (ALBATROSS) started and will offer a clear pathway to impact to the new algorithms developed as part of CSAO. 

We will present exciting methods explored to validate our results against in situ, airborne and other satellite data, including from NASA’s ICESat-2.