Comparing elevation and backscatter retrievals from CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 over Arctic summer sea ice

Dawson, Geoffrey J.; Landy, Jack C.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-4165-2023

Articles | Volume 17, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-4165-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-4165-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 9

Research article

|

27 Sep 2023

Research article |

| 27 Sep 2023

Comparing elevation and backscatter retrievals from CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 over Arctic summer sea ice

Geoffrey J. Dawson and Jack C. Landy

Data sets

ICESat-2 sea ice ancillary data - Mean Sea Surface Height Grids (1.0) Ron Kwok, Marco Bagnardi, Alek Petty, and Nathan Kurtz https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4294048

Short summary

In this study, we compared measurements from CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 over Arctic summer sea ice to understand any possible biases between the two satellites. We found that there is a difference when we measure elevation over summer sea ice using CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2, and this is likely due to surface melt ponds. The differences we found were in good agreement with theoretical predictions, and this work will be valuable for summer sea ice thickness measurements from both altimeters.