EFFECTS OF ATMOSPHERIC WATER AND SURFACE WIND ON PASSIVE MICROWAVE RETRIEVALS OF SEA ICE CONCENTRATION: A SIMULATION STUDY

The atmospheric effects on the retrieval of sea ice concentration from passive microwave sensors are examined using simulated data typical for the Arctic summer. The simulation includes atmospheric contributions of cloud liquid water and water vapor and surface wind on surface emissivity on the microwave signatures. A plane parallel radiative transfer model is used to compute brightness temperatures at SSM/I frequencies over surfaces that contain open water, first-year (FY) ice and multi-year (MY) ice and their combinations. Synthetic retrievals in this study use the NASA Team (NT) algorithm for the estimation of sea ice concentrations. This study shows that if the satellite sensor’s field of view is filled with only FY ice the retrieval is not much affected by the atmospheric conditions due to the high contrast between emission signals from FY ice surface and the signals from the atmosphere. Pure MY ice concentration is generally underestimated due to the low MY ice surface emissivity that results in the enhancement of emission signals from the atmospheric parameters. Simulation results in marginal ice areas also show that the atmospheric and surface effects tend to degrade the accuracy at low sea ice concentration. FY ice concentration is overestimated and MY ice concentration is underestimated in the presence of atmospheric water and surface wind at low ice concentration. In particular, our results suggest that strong surface wind is more important than atmospheric water in contributing to the retrieval errors of total ice concentrations over marginal ice zones.