Validation of Satellite Cryosphere Altimetry with Airborne Surveys – Results of CryoVEx Campaigns

In preparations for the first CryoSat mission ESA initiated a series of validations campaigns called CryoVEx – CryoSat Validation Experiment. For the first time DTU Space carried out a validation campaign in 2003 and continued in the following years with several pre-launch experiment followed by the first direct validation campaign in spring 2011 after the successful launch of CryoSat-2 in 2010. Since then validation experiments have been carried out both in the Arctic and Antarctic with different instrumental setup. The performance of CryoSat-2 has been validated using an airborne version of the SIRAL altimeter (ASIRAS, manufactured by Radar System Technology) combined with laser scanner altimeter observations together with e.g visual imagery. Also in the very recent campaigns a Ka-band radar system (KAREN) manufactured by MetaSensing has been added to the observations providing the opportunity to collect coincident dual frequency radar altimetry. Combined with in situ observations on ground at selected validations sites, these airborne observations provide a unique dataset of observations coincident in time and space of surface elevations and elevation changes for validation of the CryoSat products. These data have been used for studies that asses the accuracy and error sources of CryoSat-2 (e.g. the CryoVal sea ice and land ice projects). The presentation will give an overview of the airborne campaigns and summarize the main results obtained with the datasets gathered.