Estimating snow accumulation on Greenland from SSM/I radiometer data

This paper discusses a new method for determining snow accumulation on the Greenland ice sheet using passive radiometer data. The algorithm exploits high spatial correlation observed in brightness temperatures for adjacent pixels from SSM/I data to iteratively remove the effect of surface temperature and emissivity variation. This processed data reveals an exponential change in brightness temperature with time, with the time constant of this exponential proportional to the accumulation rate. Representative accumulation rates obtained using the method are shown to agree well with existing accumulation maps.