Abstract's details

Impact of SAR Processing Parameters on Sea Ice Floes and Leads Height Measurements

Sara Fleury (LEGOS, France)

Elena Zakharova (LEGOS, France); Kevin Guerreiro (LEGOS, France); Salvatore Dinardo (EUMETSAT, France)

Event: 2016 SAR Altimetry Workshop

Session: Applications, SAR for science

Presentation type: Poster

Sea-ice strongly influences global climate through the insulation of ocean from atmosphere, the ice-albedo feedback mechanisms, and the ocean circulation modification. Its extensions have been well observed since early 80’s by satellites. However, two major dimensions are still far imprecisely known for the global climate models: the variations of sea ice volumes and the sea level over Arctic ocean, both of them being identified as Essential Climate Variables (ECV) by ESA and GCOS.

The CryoSat2 altimetric mission has already demonstrated its capacity to estimate ice freeboard. Nowadays, the objectives are to better understand the uncertainties and to improve the accuracy of these estimations.

Unlike LRM altimetry, the SAR raw echoes are downloaded and processed off-line. This offers an unique opportunity to master the chain process and to adapt it according to the type of the observe surfaces. For instance, the Doppler beams ground position can be chosen; some filtering may be added in order to avoid the secondary lob effects; or even the peaky waveforms can be re-interpolated using the raw SAR signals …

Several products, using different signal treatment models or parameters, have been developed: ESA baselines B and C, SAMOSA2, SAMOSA+, CPPv14. In this study we evaluate the impact of these choices and assess the importance of different parameterisation of physical radar models in different sea ice conditions (including smooth first-year ice, rough multi-year ice with low/high snow depth, fast ice etc.).

This study should help to assess for the first Sentinel-3 measurements over sea ice.

Corresponding author:

Sara Fleury

LEGOS

France

sara.fleury@legos.obs-mip.fr

Back to the list of abstract