SWESARR: Snow Water Equivalent Radar and Radiometer
Abstract
Gradual melting of seasonal snow cover provides drinking and irrigation water to about two billion people in the northern hemisphere. However, Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) is a challenging quantity to estimate using remote sensing techniques, due to snow spatial variability and the influence of substrate, vegetation, and atmospheric properties. Even though snow covered area can be estimated based on optical or microwave remote sensing, and snow depth can be estimated from surface height differencing of snow off and snow on conditions using lidar and radar data reliably, remote sensing of SWE remains a challenge. At NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a new dual microwave instrument is being built to remotely sense SWE. SWE Synthetic Aperture Radar and Radiometer (SWESARR) relies on the relationship between SWE, microwave brightness and radar backscatter at different bands to estimate SWE. SWESARR has three active (9.65, 13.6, 17.25 GHz) and three passive (10.65, 18.7, 36.5 GHz) bands. Radar data is collected in dual polarization (VV, VH) while the radiometer makes single polarization (H) observations. The combination of all these microwave measurements will provide an important data set to improve SWE retrieval algorithms. In this presentation we will describe the instrument and its expected performance.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.C13D1173O
- Keywords:
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- 0736 Snow;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0758 Remote sensing;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0794 Instruments and techniques;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0798 Modeling;
- CRYOSPHERE