Theoretical modeling of lidar return phenomenology from snow and ice surfaces.

To advance the science of lidar sensing of complex ice and snow surfaces as well as in support of the upcoming ICESat-2 mission, this paper establishes a framework to theoretically study a spaceborne micropulselidar returns from snow and ice surfaces. First, the anticipated lidar return characteristics for a sloped non-penetrating surface is studied when measured by a multiple-channel photon-counting detector. Second, an analytical snow reflectance model based on experimental observations is applied in synthetic scene. Based on the simulation results, the spaceborne photon-counting lidar system considered here is seen to have moderate detectability on snow surfaces. In addition, for the penetrating snow model considered here, it is shown that slightly sloped snow terrain with larger snow grain size will result in smaller elevation bias.