About¶
The motivation behind ARC3O¶
The diversity in sea ice concentration observational estimates affects our understanding of past and future sea ice evolution as it inhibits reliable climate model evaluation [Notz et al., 2013] and initialization [Bunzel et al., 2016]. It also limits our ability to fully exploit relationships between the evolution of sea ice and other climate variables, such as global-mean surface temperature [Niederdrenk & Notz, 2018] and CO2 emissions [Notz & Stroeve, 2016].
To address these issues, we construct an observation operator for the Arctic Ocean at the frequency of 6.9 GHz. This operator provides an alternative approach for climate model evaluation and initialization with satellite observations.
The ARCtic Ocean Observation Operator (ARC3O) provides the possibility to simulate top-of-the-atmosphere brightness temperatures for the Arctic Ocean area at 6.9 GHz, vertical polarization, from climate model output. This simulated brightness temperature can be compared to brightness temperatures measured by satellites from space.