Monitoring sea ice concentration is required for operational and climate studies in the Arctic Sea. Technologies used so far for estimating sea ice concentration have some limitations, for instance the impact of the atmosphere, the physical temperature of ice, and the presence of snow and melting. In the last years, L-band radiometry has been successfully used to study some properties of sea ice, remarkably sea ice thickness. However, the potential of satellite L-band observations for obtaining sea ice concentration had not yet been explored. In this paper, we present preliminary evidence showing that data from the Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission can be used to estimate sea ice concentration. Our method, based on a maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE), exploits the marked difference in the radiative properties of sea ice and seawater. In addition, the brightness temperatures of 100g sea ice and 100g seawater, as well as their combined values (polarization and angular difference), have been shown to be very stable during winter and spring, so they are robust to variations in physical temperature and other geophysical parameters. Therefore, we can use just two sets of tie points, one for summer and another for winter, for calculating sea ice concentration, leading to a more robust estimate.
Barcelona Expert Center, Institute of Marine Sciences, ICM/CSIC, Passeig Maritim Barceloneta 39, Barcelona, Spain; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Haystack Observatory, Westford, MA, United States
Recommended Citation:
Gabarro C,, Turiel A,, Elosegui P,et al. New methodology to estimate Arctic sea ice concentration from SMOS combining brightness temperature differences in a maximum-likelihood estimator[J]. Cryosphere,2017-01-01,11(4)