This team will attempt to address the long-standing question on how to represent snow and ice surfaces efficiently in coupled data assimilation frameworks for numerical weather prediction (NWP), and for better monitoring of polar regions.
Models for snow emission and backscatter have proven successful at long wavelengths, but there remains a challenge to have a physically consistent model able to perform well across a wide range of wavelengths. Development of a reference quality model for ocean surface emissivity and backscatter from the microwave to the infrared was successfully achieved. That model was named PARMIO (Passive Active Reference Microwave Infrared Ocean). This activity will develop similar capability for snow and sea ice.