A remote sensing experiment to explore the radar response of sub-Arctic seasonal snow

摘要

During the 2010-2011 winter season a field experiment was conducted in the Hudson Bay Lowlands of Manitoba, Canada, to characterize the physical, environmental and radar remote sensing properties of seasonal snow on land, lake ice and sea ice. The experiment design focused on three parts: to characterize the physical properties of the snow; to characterize the environmental conditions of the landscape; to measure the radar backscatter response from the snowpack using a dual frequency (Ku- and X-band) multi-polarization scatterometer system. The study site contains a range of land surface types from shrub tundra, to wetland fen, to open forest canopy, to lake ice, in addition to sea ice in the Hudson Bay. Each of these sites has both distinct subnivean physical properties and snowpack physical properties. The experiment found that with the exception of the forest site, wind redistribution processes typically dominated snow accumulation. Air temperatures started the season above 0°C but by mid December were below freezing and remained so until April. The angular Ku- and X-band backscatter responses are reported for tundra, fen and sea ice sites; the strongest Ku response was from deeper snow (tundra) while the X-band response is from the complex subnivean media.