Studies of Sea-Ice Thickness and Salinity Retrieval Using 0.5–2 GHz Microwave Radiometry

Abstract

Arctic sea-ice thickness and salinity retrievals are simulated to explore the performance of nadir-observing microwave radiometry operating with up to 16 frequency channels in the 0.5–2-GHz frequency range. A radiative transfer model is used to create lookup tables of the circularly polarized thermal emissions of first-year (FY) and multiyear (MY) sea ice, and the performance of two distinct retrieval methods is examined. The first method retrieves only sea-ice thicknesses, while the second retrieves both ice thickness and ice salinity. Retrieval errors are simulated for both FY and MY sea ice as a function of ice thickness, salinity, and temperature to investigate the impact of radiometric uncertainty, the frequency channels used, and any errors in ancillary information. To gain further insight into Arctic scale retrieval performance, a simulated brightness temperature dataset is produced for Arctic sea ice for the period October 2020–March 2021 using sea-ice thicknesses from the SMOS-CryoSat-2 algorithm. Compared to existing sea-ice thickness retrievals obtained from 1.4-GHz microwave radiometers, the results demonstrate that 0.5–2-GHz radiometry can achieve higher sensitivity to a sea-ice thickness within the range 0.5–1.5 m for FY sea ice and enable the retrieval of multiple sea-ice parameters (thickness and salinity) simultaneously.