Upper panels, color-coded images of the daily spatial distributions of (lower left) snow grain radius in µm and (lower right) mass fraction of impurities mixed in snow in ppmw retrieved by the GLI CTSK2b1 algorithm.

Snow grains are kept small (r<500µm) over the Greenland ice-sheet where altitude is very high and thus temperature is kept low even in summer, on the contrary that snow grains over the snow within the Arctic Ocean are large (r>500µm) and become larger toward the lower latitude areas reflecting the spatial distributions of received solar radiation and air temperature. As for snow impurities mass fractions are high for the snow over sea-ice near the continental coasts, which can be due to the dry deposition of wind-blown dusts or anthropogenic aerosol particles from the continents.

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Earth Observation Research and application Center, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
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