New Method to Remotely Sense Ice Sheet Subsurface Temperature Demonstrated
UWBRAD instrument installed in the DC-3T aircraft. The cylinder in the foreground is the deployable “periscope” antenna, and the instrument electronics are housed in the rack in the background. (Credit: Joel Johnson/OSU) Technology Development: A new instrument, the Ultrawideband Software-Defined Microwave Radiometer (UWBRAD), aims to provide measurements of ice sheet thermal emission to remotely sense internal ice sheet temperature information. Physical temperature plays an important role in influencing stressstrain relationships in the ice sheet volume, and therefore impacts ice sheet dynamics including deformation and flow across the ice sheet base. Previous studies and models have shown the potential of multi-frequency brightness temperature measurements to obtain deep ice sheet temperature information, given assumed ice sheet internal temperatures, electromagnetic permittivity, and other physical parameters such as density and particle grain size. UWBRAD is designed to provide brightness temperature observations over the 0.5-2 GHz range, using multiple frequency channels and full-bandwidth sampling of each channel. In November 2015, the...