Firn Clutter Constraints on the Design and Performance of Orbital Radar Ice Sounders

Radar sounding is a powerful tool for constraining subglacial conditions, which influence the mass balance of polar ice sheets and their contributions to global sea-level rise. A satellite-based radar sounder, such as those successfully demonstrated at Mars, would offer unprecedented spatial and temporal coverage of the subsurface. However, airborne sounding studies suggest that poorly constrained radar scattering in polar firn may produce performance-limiting clutter for terrestrial orbital sounders. We develop glaciologically constrained electromagnetic models of radar interactions in firn, test them against in situ data and multifrequency airborne radar observations, and apply the only model we find to be consistent with observation to assess the implications of firn clutter for orbital sounder system design. Our results show that in the very high-frequency (VHF) and ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) bands, radar interactions in the firn are dominated by quasi-specular reflections at the interfaces between layers of different densities and that off-nadir backscatter is likely the result of small-scale roughness in the subsurface density profiles. As a result, high frequency (HF) or low VHF center frequencies offer a significant advantage in near-surface clutter suppression compared to the UHF band. However, the noise power is the dominant constraint in all bands, so the near-surface clutter primarily constrains the extent to which the transmit power, pulselength, or antenna gain can be engineered to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Our analysis suggests that the deep interior of terrestrial ice sheets is a difficult target for orbital sounding, which may require optimizations in azimuth processing and cross-track clutter suppression which complement existing requirements for sounding at the margins.