Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Science Rendezvous > 2009 Posters
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Analysis of Passive Microwave and Enhanced-Resolution Scatterometer Sea Ice Estimates

Walt Meier and Julienne Stroeve

The SeaWinds scatterometer on NASA’s QuikScat satellite now provides routine daily coverage of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. Scatterometer data is an important complement to the long-running SSM/I passive microwave (PM) sea ice timeseries. While scatterometers and PM radiometers both operate in the microwave frequencies, scatterometers are active instruments and can potentially provide improved or additional information on sea ice conditions. The nominal spatial resolution (25-50 km) and coverage of both QuikScat and SSM/I is similar. However, techniques have been developed to use multiple swaths to enhance spatial resolution. Effective resolutions of 8-10 km have been achieved, though there is a cost of longer time averaging and higher noise the fields. Here, enhanced-resolution QuikScat extents are compared to non-enhanced SSM/I ice concentrations from the NASA Team (NT) algorithm produced at NASA Goddard and archived online at NSIDC (http://nsidc.org/data/seaice/). The ice edge from each is evaluated *and* compared to visible and infrared imagery from AVHRR.