92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Tuesday, 24 January 2012
NOAA-CREST Field Experiment: Remote Sensing of Snow Properties Using Microwave Radiometry
Hall E (New Orleans Convention Center )
Tarendra Lakhankar, NOAA-CREST, The City Univ. of New York, New York, NY; and J. Muņoz, P. Romanov, and D. R. Khanbilvardi

The characterization of intra-seasonal variations of snow pack properties is critical for hydro- meteorological applications. The NOAA-CREST field experiment was setup to understand snowpack response to microwave multi-channel dual-polarized remote sensing sensors. The 37 and 89 GHz microwave radiometers measures horizontally and vertically polarized brightness temperatures with an incident angle of 55 degree, which coincides with SSM/I and AMSR-E. Both radiometers recorded real time data at an observation cycle of one minute. The field experiment site is located in backyard of the National Weather Service office at Caribou, ME (46.52N, 68.01W). In the field, following ground-truth parameter snow depth, SWE, snow skin temperature and vertical snow temperature profile are being measured throughout the winter season, to better understand the snow response in temporal phase (early winter, mid-winter, and melting period) of winter season. In this presentation, we will discuss about field experiment details, preliminary observations and current objectives. The seasonal behavior of measured snow depth, temperature, snow grain size on the brightness temperature measured from 37 and 89 GHz radiometer will be presented. The sensitivity of fresh and aged snow over the microwave emission will be discussed. During early spring periods, we observed larger diurnal variation in brightness temperature due to cold nights and the warm days (> 0 degrees) that causing wet snow and freezing snow.

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