Estimation of air and surface temperature evolution of the East Antarctic Sheet by means of passive microwave remote sensing

Antarctica is an important part of the Earth ecosystem. Due to its temperature, mass of stored water (and related thermal inertia) and position, it influences the atmosphere and marine circulations. Despite of its importance, Antarctica is the most unexplored region of Earth. The knowledge about the Antarctic environment is very limited due to its impervious conditions which hamper the human exploration. In this context remote sensing techniques helps in filling the gap. As pointed out in some preliminary works [1][2], microwave brightness temperature data can be useful for estimating snow sub-surface and air temperature. The aim of this paper is to extend previous studies by using AWS and AMSR-E data collected daily for 6 years for estimating snow and air temperature over the East Antarctic plateau. We assessed that the snow sub-surface temperature can be estimated by using linear regressions with a R between satellite and ground data greater than 0.9 (the retrieval RMSE obtained is around IK), while the determination coefficient of the relationships between the air and brightness temperatures was found to be around 0.7 (the associated retrieval RMSE varies between 2K and 7K).