Investigations of Temperature and Backscatter Correlation in the Dry Snow Zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Utah State University

Due to system degradation, satellite-borne scatterometers require post-launch calibrations to maintain accuracy. The dry snow zone of the Greenland ice sheet has been used for calibration due to its relatively constant backscatter properties. However, we recently discovered that some of the variation in the dry snow zone backscatter is seasonal. This paper uses correlation analysis to investigate the relationship between temperature and backscatter in the dry snow zone. The correlation coefficient is found to be significant, especially after spatially averaging the backscatter. However, an analysis and simulation demonstrate that spatial averaging can artificially increase the correlation coefficient.