SWEAT: Snow Water Equivalent with AlTimetry

Manuela Unterberger , Stephen Hardwick , Dries Agten , Jan J. Benninga (1) , Carlos Diaz Schümmer , Julia Maria Donnerer , Georg Fischer , Marie Henriksen , Alexandre Hippert-Ferrer (2) , Maryam Jamali , Stefano Marinaci , Toby Jd Mould , Liam Phelan , Stephanie Rosker , Caroline Schrenker , Kerstin Schulze , Jorge Emanuel Telo , Bordalo Monteiro

1 Landbouw Economisch Instituut
2 LISTIC - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Systèmes, Traitement de l'Information et de la Connaissance

Team Orange would like to thank FFG and ESA for organising the Summer School Alpbach 2016. Also thanks to all the tutors and lecturers guiding Team Orange towards this product, and a special thank to our team tutors. Abstract Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) is not directly measured by current satellite missions but has a significant impact on society and our lack of understanding contributes to significant inaccuracies in current estimations of hydrological and climate models, calculations of the Earth's energy balance (albedo) and flood predictions. To address this, the SWEAT (Snow Water Equivalent with AlTimetry) mission aims to measure SWE directly on sea ice and land in the polar regions above 60 • and below-60 • latitude. The primary scientific objectives are to (a) improve estimations of global SWE from passive microwave products and (b) improve numerical snow and climate models. The mission will implement a novel combination of Ka-and Ku-band radioaltimeter technology, each providing different snow penetration properties. Airborne Laser altimeter campaigns will shadow the satellite orbit path early, middle and late winter for the first two years of the mission to confirm Ka-Band surface measurement accuracies. The combined difference in signal penetration results will enable more accurate determination of SWE.Therefore, the SWEAT mission aims to improve estimations of global SWE interpreted from passive microwave products, and improve the reliability of numerical snow and climate models.

Domaines: Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]

Manuela Unterberger, Stephen Hardwick, Dries Agten, Jan J. Benninga, Carlos Diaz Schümmer, et al.. SWEAT: Snow Water Equivalent with AlTimetry. EGU General Assembly, Apr 2017, Vienne, Austria. pp.2017 - 16487. ⟨hal-02184213⟩