SASSIE Arctic Field Campaign PALS Data Fall 2022

The Salinity and Stratification at the Sea Ice Edge (SASSIE) project is a NASA experiment that aims to understand how salinity anomalies in the upper ocean generated by melting sea ice affect sea surface temperature (SST), stratification, and subsequent sea-ice growth. SASSIE involved a field campaign that sampled the transition from summer melt to autumn ice advance in the Beaufort Sea during August-October 2022, making intensive in situ and remote sensing observations within ~200km of the sea ice edge. The Passive-Active L-Band System (PALS) is an airborne microwave radiometer that senses ocean temperature and surface wind speed. The brightness temperature data is obtained at 1.4GHz using the PALS conical scanner, with the raw data sampled at 1ms and gridded over an approximate 2x2km grid. Several quality control steps were done to remove any scan dependent biases, radio frequency interference, wind-speed dependencies. Calibration of the sensor was done with respect to special aircraft maneuvers as well as in-situ samples. Brightness temperature were converted to salinity via the Klein-Swift salinity retrieval model. Data is available in netCDF format.