Large Variability in Dominant Scattering From Sentinel-1 SAR in East Antarctica: Challenges and Opportunities

Assessing the Surface Mass Balance (SMB) of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is crucial for understanding its response to climate change. Synthetic Aperture Radar observations from Sentinel-1 provide the potential to monitor the variability of SMB processes through changes in the scattering response of near-surface and internal snow layers. However, the interplay between several factors, such as accumulation, wind erosion, deposition, and melt, complicates the interpretation of scattering changes of the microwave signal. Additionally, lack of reliable ground truth measurements of the snow surface limits our capability to associate the SMB processes with dominant scattering mechanism. In this study, we aim to quantify the dominant scattering in Sentinel-1 signal and evaluate the scattering changes in drifting snow-dominated regions of East Antarctica. We introduce a scattering indicator,
$\alpha _{\text{scat},\varepsilon }$
, derived from scattering-type and entropy descriptors, providing a measure between volume and pure scattering. By relating the field measurements to
$\alpha _{\text{scat},\varepsilon }$
, we establish that the evolution of dominant scattering in the presence of snowdrift is complex. First,
$\alpha _{\text{scat},\varepsilon }$
strongly correlates with surface roughness (
$R^{2}=0.92$
, RMSE
$=2^\circ$
). Spatially variable erosion patterns significantly increase the roughness and result in a strong affinity towards pure scattering despite net accumulation. Second, high surface densities also tend to influence pure scattering; however, the effect is dependent on the accumulation rate. With more accumulation, we observe an increasing dominance of volume scattering from internal snow layers. Long-term trends in
$\alpha _{\text{scat},\varepsilon }$
(2017/2023) further suggest that it is challenging to address the causes behind the scattering source based on a single snow surface process. We thus demonstrate the potential and limitations of
$\alpha _{\text{scat},\varepsilon }$
to infer the variability in dominant scattering from changes in surface processes.