ESA SnowLab Project: 4 Years Of Wide Band Scatterometer Measurements Of Seasonal Snow

The aim of the ESA SnowLab project is to provide a comprehensive multi-frequency, multi-polarisation, multi-temporal dataset of active microwave measurements over snow-covered grounds to investigate the relationship between effective snow- and ground parameters and the resultant signals detected by microwave radar. An important part for the development of microwave models is the microstructural characterisation. This characterisation can only be done by repeated measurements by SnowMicroPen and more completely, but also much more expensive, by X-ray micro-tomography. Within this project we complemented the microwave measurements of Alpine snow in Switzerland with extensive effective snow- and ground parameters and meteorological data. Microwave backscatter measurements were conducted using the 9 – 18 GHz ESA SnowScat instrument and since December 2018 the recently built ESA WBScat instrument. WBScat allows to extend the spectral coverage to 1 – 40 GHz.