Revisiting Operation IceBridge snow-on-sea-ice measurements in the Arctic ✈️❄️

This repository represents the research I did during my master thesis project (the thesis itself is contained in /Documentation). The aim was to highlight strenghts and weaknesses of the NASA Operation IceBridge (OIB) snow depth measurements performed with the snow radar by validating with in-situ data.

Methodology

The comparison is based on gridded laser scanner and in-situ snow depth measurements which are then compared with the snow radar estimate of the air--snow and snow--ice interface. Since there are multiple algorithms to retrieve the interfaces (and thus snow depth), these are further compared to the official NSIDC data product. pySnowRadar (https://github.com/kingjml/pySnowRadar) is utilized to implement the CWT (Newman et al., 2014) and PEAK (Jutila et al., 2022) algorithms.

Necessary data

To reproduce the results (or do own experimentation), there are several necessary datasets. For most of them I included a downloading script in /Downloading, which loads the data into /Data.

From OIB the following data products are used :

1. OIB L1B snow radar echograms (https://nsidc.org/data/irsno1b/versions/2)
2. OIB L1B ATM Elevation (https://nsidc.org/data/ilatm1b/versions/2)
3. OIB L4 Quicklook data product (https://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0708/versions/1)

A (free) NASA earthdata account is necessary to get the data.

The in-situ measurements can be found on Josh Kings GitHub:

1. ECCC Eureka 2014 campaign (https://github.com/kingjml/ECCC-Eureka-2014-Snow-on-Sea-Ice-Campaign)
2. ECCC Eureka 2016 campaign (https://github.com/kingjml/ECCC-Eureka-2016-OpenData)

For large scale analysis, the University of Bremens multi-year ice concentration data is used: https://seaice.uni-bremen.de/ice-type/

References

Newman, Thomas, Sinead L. Farrell, Jacqueline Richter-Menge, Laurence N. Connor, Nathan T. Kurtz, Bruce C. Elder, and David McAdoo. “Assessment of Radar-Derived Snow Depth over Arctic Sea Ice.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 119, no. 12 (2014): 8578–8602. https://doi.org/10.1002/2014JC010284.

Jutila, Arttu, Joshua King, John Paden, Robert Ricker, Stefan Hendricks, Chris Polashenski, Veit Helm, Tobias Binder, and Christian Haas. “High-Resolution Snow Depth on Arctic Sea Ice From Low-Altitude Airborne Microwave Radar Data.” IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 60 (2022): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2021.3063756.