Inversion-based sensitivity analysis of snow-covered sea ice electromagnetic profiles

For the microwave remote sensing of snow-covered sea ice dielectric profiles, the sensitivity of the normalized radar cross-section data with respect to the complex permittivity and thickness values is investigated. Our results show that the data collected closer to the nadir in monostatic setups, and the data collected closer to the specular angle in bistatic setups represent higher sensitivity values. Using both synthetically and experimentally collected data sets, we demonstrate that the inversion of data sets having higher sensitivity values results in enhanced reconstruction accuracy.