Snow over sea ice controls the energy budgets, affects the sea ice growth/melting, and thus has essential climatic effects. Snow depth, one of the fundamental properties of snow cover, is essential for understanding of the rapid change in Antarctic climate and for sea ice thickness estimation. Passive microwave radiometer can be used for basin-scale snow depth estimation in daily scale, however, previous published methods applied for Antarctic snow depth shows clear underestimation, which limits their further application. Here, we construct a new and robust linear regression equation for snow depth retrieval using microwave radiometers by including lower frequencies, and we produce the snow depth product over Antarctic sea ice from 2002 to 2020 from AMSR-E, AMSR-2, SSMIS based on this method. A regression analysis using 7 years of Operation IceBridge (OIB) airborne snow depth measurements shows that the gradient ratio (GR) calculated using brightness temperatures in vertical polarized 37 and 19 GHz, i.e., GR(37/7), is the optimal one for deriving Antarctic snow depth with an root mean square deviation (RMSD) of 8.92 cm and a correlation coefficient of -0.64, the related equation coefficients are then derived. GR(37/19) is used to retrieve snow depth from SSMIS data to fill the observation gaps between AMSR-E and AMSR-2, and the estimated snow depth is corrected for the consistence with these from AMSR-E/2. An averaged uncertainty of 3.81 cm is found based on a Gaussian error propagation, which accounts for 12% of the estimated mean snow depth. The evaluation of proposed method with in-situ measurements from Australian Antarctic Data Centre shows that the proposed method outperforms the previous available method, with a mean difference of 5.64 cm and an RMSD of 13.79 cm, comparing to -14.47 cm and 19.49 cm. Comparison to shipborne observations from Antarctic Sea Ice Processes and Climate indicates that the proposed method shows slight better performance than previous method (RMSDs of 16.85 cm and 17.61 cm, respectively); and comparable performances in growth and melting seasons suggests that the proposed method can still be used in the melting season. We generate a complete snow depth product over Antarctic sea ice from 2002 to 2020 in daily scale, and negative trends can be found in all sea sectors and seasons. This dataset can be further used in the reanalysis data evaluation, sea ice thickness estimation, climate model and other aspects.
SHEN Xiaoyi, KE Changqing
The original data of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice data set is generated by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) through remote sensing data. The data format is GeoTIFF format and image format. The spatial resolution of the data is 25km and the time resolution is day. The data content is the sea ice range and sea ice density of the north and south poles. In this study, NetCDF format products are generated by post-processing the extent and density of sea ice in the north and south poles. The product data includes the sea ice range and sea ice density data of the north and south poles from 1979 to 2019. The time resolution is day by day, the coverage range is the South Pole and the north pole, and the horizontal spatial resolution is 12.5km. The data value of 1 in the sea ice range matrix indicates that the grid is sea ice, and the sea ice density is expressed by 0-1000. The grid value divided by 10 is the sea ice density value of the grid.
YE Aizhong
The data sets include four sets of data obtained from the Scanning Multi-channel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR), Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) and the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) sensors using passive microwave remote sensing inversion. SMMR was aboard the Nimbus-7 satellite, and its working period was from October 26, 1978 to July 8, 1987. Since July 1987, the data provided by the SSM/I and the SSMIS aboard the US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellite group have been used. The first three data sets contain sea ice concentration data, covering the Antarctic region with a spatial resolution of 25 km: (1) The data were obtained from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Version 1 by applying the NASA Team algorithm inversion. The temporal coverage is from November 1978 to February 2017, with a temporal resolution of one month. A bin file is stored every month. (2) The data source is the same as the first set. The temporal coverage is from 1978-10-26 to 2017-2-28. The temporal resolution is two days, and the spatial resolution is 25 km. A folder was stored every year, and a bin file was stored every other day. (3) The data were obtained from near-real-time DMSP SSMIS by applying the NASA Team algorithm inversion. The temporal coverage is from 2015-1-1 to 2018-2-3, and the temporal resolution is one day. A bin file is stored every day. Each file consists of a 300-byte file title (data time information, projection pattern, file name) and a 316*332 matrix. The fourth set of data is the sea ice coverage and sea ice area time series. The temporal coverage is from November 1978 to December 2017. This data set is a time series sequence of sea ice coverage and sea ice area in the Antarctic. The temporal resolution is one month, and an ASCII file is stored every month. Each file consists of a file title (time, data type), a 39*1 sea ice cover matrix and a 39*1 sea ice area matrix. For further details on the data, please visit the US Ice and Snow Data Center NSIDC website - Data Description http://nsidc.org/data/NSIDC-0051; http://nsidc.org/data/NSIDC-0081; http://nsidc.org/data/G02135
LI Shuanglin, LIU Na
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