Investigation of TanDEM-X Penetration Depth over the Greenland Ice Sheet

Abstract

Polar regions pass through dramatic changes caused by ongoing climate warming. In many areas, rapid retreat of glaciers and ice sheets has been observed within the past decades, which leads to significant consequences globally. In order to understand and predict these complex processes and their impacts on the environment as well as on human systems, detailed and area-wide information on the environment’s response to climatic changes is required. Interferometric SAR systems enable the derivation of 3-d information independent of cloud cover and illumination, and thus offer an efficient technique to collect information on glaciers and ice sheets worldwide. However, these interferometric elevation data suffer from penetration of the SAR signal into the snow and ice surface. In this context, the aim of this study is to investigate the penetration depth of interferometric X-band SAR data in order to provide reliable and accurate elevation measurements. In the presented study, we explore penetration depth of interferometric TanDEM-X elevation data with respect to different snow zones over the Greenland ice sheet.