Iceberg tracking - SMOS over Antarctica

• Main Authors: Slominska, E., Marczewski, W., Slominski, J.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctica; Brightness temperature; Electron mobility; Iceberg tracking; L-band radiometry; Microwave radiometry; Sea ice; SMOS; Stokes parameters; Stokes vector
• ISSN: 2153-6996; 2153-7003
• DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS.2012.6350479

As part of a natural cycle, ice shelves periodically calve icebergs. In March 2000, Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf released a colossal berg, assigned as B-15. The B-15 was the world`s largest recorded iceberg with the area of over 11,000 km 2 . B15 started to break into smaller pieces in 2002 and 2003. One of the pieces from the "B-15 family" (more precisely B-15J) was spotted by the SMOS satellite. For nearly a year the iceberg was tracked on the SMOS data, what provided significant set of information for detailed studies of the object evolution. During the last two months of 2011, the iceberg had strayed far enough from Antarctica in the equatorial direction to begin breaking into smaller pieces. At the end of December the signatures of observed iceberg were barely apparent, making further tracking not feasible. Therefore, we can state that SMOS was also the witness of the final stage of evolution of B-15J. Here we report the last months of iceberg-drifting. The analysis is carried out with application of SMOS land and sea full polarisation browse products (L1c data) in order to obtain general representation of seasonal variability in the southern hemisphere. We monitor the direction of motion, speed, and investigate the temporal evolution of brightness temperature, as well as polarimetric characteristics.