Technical note: A sensitivity analysis from 1 to 40 GHz for observing the Arctic Ocean with the Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer

Abstract

Abstract. The Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR) is one of the high-priority missions for the expansion of the Copernicus program within the European Space Agency (ESA). It is designed to respond to the European Union Arctic policy. Its channels, incidence angle, precision, and spatial resolutions have been selected to observe the Arctic Ocean with the recommendations expressed by the user communities. In this note, we present the sensitivity analysis that has led to the choice of the CIMR channels. The famous figure from Wilheit (1979), describing the frequency sensitivity of passive microwave satellite observations to ocean parameters, has been extensively used for channel selection of microwave radiometer frequencies on board oceanic satellite missions. Here, we propose to update this sensitivity analysis, using state-of-the-art radiative transfer simulations for different geophysical conditions (Arctic, mid-latitude, tropics). We used the Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) from Meissner and Wentz (2012) for the ocean surface, the Round Robin Data Package of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (Pedersen et al., 2019) for the sea ice, and the RTM from Rosenkranz (2017) for the atmosphere. The sensitivities of the brightness temperatures (TBs) observed by CIMR as a function of sea surface temperature (SST), sea surface salinity (SSS), sea ice concentration (SIC), ocean wind speed (OWS), total column water vapor (TCWV), and total column liquid water (TCLW) are presented as a function of frequency between 1 and 40 GHz. The analysis underlines the difficulty to reach the user requirements with single-channel retrieval, especially under cold ocean conditions. With simultaneous measurements between 1.4 and 36 GHz onboard CIMR, applying multi-channel algorithms will be facilitated, to provide the user community with the required ocean and ice information under arctic environments.