Microwave remote sensing of multi-layered rough-surface snow-covered sea ice dielectric profile: Sensitivity analysis and inversion

The goal of this paper is to investigate the sensitivity of the normalized radar cross section data collected from a given arctic profile of interest with respect to snow and ice complex permittivities and their thickness values. To calculate this sensitivity, the recently-developed boundary perturbation theory is used as a forward scattering solver. This sensitivity analysis is then used to set some guideline for appropriate data collection schemes to be used for arctic dielectric profile inversion. Finally, the inversion of two different data sets having different sensitivities to the unknown model parameters are presented and compared.