Consideration of Atmospheric Effects for Sea Ice Concentration Retrieval from Satellite Microwave Observations

Abstract

The numerical modeling of the sea ice-ocean-atmosphere system microwave radiation for the characteristics of AMSR2 (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2) measurement channels is applied to substantiate the weather filters’ usage in the algorithms for sea ice concentration (SIC) retrievals from AMSR2 data. It is shown that the weather filter performance depends not only on atmospheric parameters but also on the type of the geophysical model function (GMF) used to parameterize the ocean emission dependence on surface wind speed (SWS). The analysis of high-resolution synthetic aperture radar along with SWS and SIC satellite products reveals that the SIC of spurious sea ice increases proportionally to SWS and exceeds 50% under conditions of storm winds with SWS > 25 m/s.