Assessing Snow Properties’ Impact on Various Sensors with the Snow Microwave Radiative Transfer Model

Arctic Sea-ice extent is declining due to climate change. Wildlife, maritime operations and northern communities that depend on sea-ice for traveling and hunting are negatively affected by its decline. Monitoring sea-ice thickness is an important tool to help in decision making in Arctic regions but, due to the snow covering the sea-ice, remote sensing’s sea-ice thickness retrieval methods are not yet accurate enough to assess every situation.
The Snow Microwave Radiative Transfer (SMRT) model is used to understand how snow properties impact radar scattering. This internship offers the first opportunity to assess the capacity of SMRT to simulate a frequency-modulated continuous wavelength radar responses to snow properties on sea-ice. It will also allow to evaluate the influence of snow variability and its aggregation across different footprint sizes of space born sensors, such as Sentinel-1 and CryoSat-2. This work will contribute directly to increase the accuracy of sea-ice thickness retrievals.

Faculty Supervisor:

Alexandre Langlois

Student:

Partner:

Northumbria University

Discipline:

Earth science

Sector:

Environmental Science and Technology; Water; Aerospace

University:

Université de Sherbrooke

Program: