ESA SMOS Sea Ice Processing and Dissemination Service
Arbeitsgruppe Fernerkundung & Assimilation
ESA SMOS Sea Ice Processing and Dissemination Service
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite mission, which is launched in November 2009, measures for the first time the Earth's radiation at a low microwave frequency of 1.4 GHz (about 21 cm wave length). Although SMOS was originally designed to detect soil moisture and ocean salinity, it has also been used to retrieve thin ice thickness, due to the relatively high penetration depth at L-band. The aim of the SMOSIce study was to develop, improve and validate algorithms for sea ice thickness retrieval from SMOS. The potential to derive the ice thickness from L- band radiometry mainly depends on sea ice temperature and salinity. Several different sea ice emissivity models and retrieval algorithms have been developed and assessed using independent ice thickness estimates. The assessment has shown a clear advantage of a retrieval method that accounts for variations in ice temperature and ice salinity. This retrieval method determines the maximum thickness that can be retrieved. Sensitivity studies as well as comparisons with MODIS ice thickness revealed significantly better performance of the retrieval based on the brightness temperature near nadir in comparison to the difference of vertically and horizonally polarised brightness temperatures in the higher incidence angle range. A sea ice thickness product has been derived from SMOS Level 1C brigthness temperature and is continuously updated and distributed via the Integrated Climate Data Center at the University of Hamburg. The approximate uncertainties of the SMOS ice thickness retrieval are about 20% for ice thickness less than 30 cm and 100% for ice thickness more than half a meter with an ill-constrained upper limit.
Link: http://icdc.zmaw.de/l3c_smos_sit.html?&L=1
- Dauer: 2014-2016 mit möglicher Verlängerung bis 2018
- Drittmittelgeber: ESA Service Level Agreement ESRIN