Simulated Geophysical Noise in Sea Ice Concentration Estimates of Open Water and Snow-Covered Sea Ice

Abstract

Sea ice concentration algorithms using brightness temperatures ($T_{B}$) from satellite microwave radiometers are used to compute sea ice concentration ($c_{\text{ice}}$), sea ice extent, and generate sea ice climate data records. Therefore, it is important to minimize the sensitivity of $c_{\text{ice}}$ estimates to geophysical noise caused by snow/sea ice thermal microwave emission signature variations, and presence of WV and clouds in the atmosphere and/or near-surface winds. In this study, we investigate the effect of geophysical noise leading to systematic $c_{\text{ice}}$ biases and affecting $c_{\text{ice}}$ standard deviations (STD) using simulated top of the atmosphere $T_{B}$s over open water and 100% sea ice. We consider three case studies for the Arctic and the Antarctic and eight different $c_{\text{ice}}$ algorithms, representing different families of algorithms based on the selection of channels and methodologies. Our simulations show that, over open water and low $c_{\text{ice}}$, algorithms using gradients between V-polarized 19-GHz and 37-GHz $T_{B}$s show the lowest sensitivity to the geophysical noise, while the algorithms exclusively using near-90-GHz channels have by far the highest sensitivity. Over sea ice, the atmosphere plays a much smaller role than over open water, and the $c_{\text{ice}}$ STD for all algorithms is smaller than over open water. The hybrid and low-frequency (6 GHz) algorithms have the lowest sensitivity to noise over sea ice, while the polarization type of algorithms has the highest noise levels.

Keywords

• Microwave radiometry
• sea ice concentration
• sea ice emission modeling