Authors
Ann Windnagel (NSIDC), Florence Fetterer (NSIDC), Walt Meier (NSIDC)
Abstract
The NOAA/NSIDC Climate Data Record (CDR) of Passive Microwave Sea Ice Concentration (SIC) is a data product that provides over 46-years of SIC estimates derived from brightness temperature data from passive microwave (PM) sensors. Because there is no single PM sensor that covers this entire period, multiple sensors must be used. For the SIC CDR, the sensors used are the Nimbus-7 Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR), and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) and the Special Sensor Microwave Imager and Sounder (SSMIS). The data from each of these sensors are stitched together at the transitions between each instrument to get a continuous SIC record. In the past, this has been accomplished using constant coefficients called tie-points that adjust the brightness temperatures from one instrument to the next so that they are intercalibrated. This was sufficient when the instruments used were similar in spatial resolution (e.g. SMMR, SSM/I, and SSMIS). Now that the DMSP satellites are aging, there is a need to switch to the next generation satellites to keep the record going into the future. One such instrument is the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) sensor onboard the Global Change Observation Mission - W1 (GCOM-W1) satellite, which has a higher spatial resolution than the previous sensors. This makes intercalibrating more difficult and the tie-point method by itself is not sufficient. We have developed an additional method based on work by Seki et al. (2024) that uses sea ice concentration thresholds to adjust the SSMIS SIC to better match AMSR2 data. This poster describes that method and the initial results.