Measuring Sea Ice Thickness and Emissivity with SMOS and Aquarius Radiometers

European Space Agency (ESA) Living Planet Symposium, 9-13 September 2013, EdinburghOn November 2, 2009, the European Space Agency's (ESA) launched the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite carrying a microwave synthetic aperture radiometer working at 1.4 GHz (wavelength of 21 cm). The main objective of the mission is to provide Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) and Soil Moisture (SM) observations, with a spatial resolution of 30-50 km, and an accuracy suited for climate studies. Many studies have been performed studying the quality of the retrieved SSS and the SM measurements. However, SMOS can also measure the ice thickness, over ice, with good accuracy for a thin sea ice layer (less about 0.5 cm). These measurements could be complementary to CryoSat, which can best measure ice thickness for thicker ice. This work will present a comparison between ice thickness measured by SMOS and in situ measurements from buoys and other satellite measurements. Moreover, the comparison will also be performed with Aquarius NASA's radiometer, launched on June 2011, which has three real aperture radiometers at 1.4GHz. The insitu dataset used for the comparison and validation of the methodology will be one obtained with Ice Mass Balance (IMB) and other buoys deployed as part of the SATICE project (http://satice.icm.csic.es/) in the western Arctic Ocean. SSMI data and CryoSat data will also be used for comparisonPeer Reviewe