Temporal and Spatial Variability of Multi-frequency Microwave Emission from the East Antarctic Plateau

The Antarctic plateau is a part of Antarctica extending for a few hundred kilometers around the South Pole with an average elevation close to 3000 m a.s.l.. This area provides unique opportunities for various scientific disciplines including Glaciology, Atmospheric and Earth Sciences. In addition, there is growing interest, in using the Antarctic plateau, for calibrating and validating data of satellite-borne microwave and radiometers. This is because the size, structure, spatial homogeneity and thermal stability of this area. In this paper we analyse temporal and spatial variability of multi-frequency microwave emission from an area around the Dome-C scientific station by using AMSR-E data collected along the year 2005. Moreover we use a multi-layer coherent electromagnetic model to estimate the contribution of snow layers to the emission at various frequencies.