Daily acquisitions from satellite microwave sensors can be used to observe the spatial and temporal characteristics of the Arctic sea-ice snowmelt onset because the initial presence of liquid water in a dry snowpack causes a dramatic change in the active and passive-microwave response. A daily sequence of backscatter coefficient images from the NASA scatterometer (NSCAT) clearly shows the spatially continuous progression of decreasing backscatter associated with snowmelt onset across the Arctic Ocean during spring 1997. A time series of the active NSCAT backscatter and a scattering index from the passive Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) show similar trends during the time of the melt onset. An NSCAT snowmelt-onset detection algorithm is developed using the derivative of the backscatter with respect to time to select a melt-onset date for each pixel, generating a melt map for the Arctic sea ice. Comparison between this melt map and one previously generated from an SSM/I scattering index shows the NSCATalgorithm predicts the onset occurs 1-10 days earlier than the SSM/I-based algorithm for most portions of multi-year ice.
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