Originally designed for wind velocity estimation over the ocean, scatterometers have since been applied to climate studies of the Earth's cryosphere and bioshere. As an integral part of climatological studies of the planet, the NASA Scatterometer Climate Record Pathfinder (SCP) supplies scatterometer-based products designed to aid researchers in climatological studies of the planet. In this thesis, necessary steps are taken to facilitate data from the Oceansat-2 Ku-band scatterometer (OSCAT) to be used in extending the Ku-band SCP dataset of conically scanning pencil-beam scatterometers begun by the Seawinds scatterometer flown on the QuikSCAT mission 1999-2009. As a standard SCP product, a temporal resolution enhancement technique for the scatterometer image reconstruction (SIR) algorithm is applied to OSCAT data. A relative cross-calibration method is developed to ensure consistency amongst datasets of conically scanning pencil-beam scatterometers in the SCP data time series. By application of the method, both raw data and SIR image data of OSCAT is cross-calibrated with QuikSCAT. To enable creation of SCP products requiring knowledge of the spatial response function (SRF) with OSCAT data, a method of estimating the SRF of pencil-beam scatterometers is developed. The estimation method employs rank-reduced least-squares to invert the radar equation using measurements over islands. A simulation is performed to validate the efficacy of the method and provide optimum choice of island size and number of singular values used in rank-reduced least-squares. The utility of the SRF estimates is demonstrated by applying an estimate of the OSCAT SRF to SIR image construction with OSCAT data.

The Greenland ice sheet is an area of great interest to the scientific community due to its role as an important bellwether for the global climate. Satellite-borne scatterometers are particularly well-suited to studying temporal changes in the Greenland ice sheet because of their high spatial coverage, frequent sampling, and sensitivity to the presence of liquid water. The dry snow zone is the largest component of the Greenland ice sheet and is identified as the region that experiences negligible annual melt. Due to the lack of melt in the dry snow zone, backscatter was previously assumed to be relatively constant over time in this region. However, this thesis shows that a small seasonal variation in backscatter is present in QuikSCAT data in the dry snow zone. Understanding the cause of this seasonal variability is important to verify the accuracy of QuikSCAT measurements, to better understand the ice sheet conditions, and to improve future scatterometer calibration efforts that may use ice sheets as calibration targets.This thesis provides a study of the temporal behavior of backscatter in the dry snow zone of the Greenland ice sheet focusing on seasonal variation. Spatial averaging of backscatter and the Karhunen-Lo`eve transform are used to identify and study the dominant patterns in annual backscatter behavior. Several QuikSCAT instrumental parameters are tested as possible causes of seasonal variation in backscatter in the dry snow zone to verify the accuracy of QuikSCAT products. None of the tested parameters are found to be related to seasonal variation. Further evidence is given that suggests that the cause of the seasonal variation is geophysical and several geophysical factors are tested. Temperature is found to be highly related to dry snow backscatter and therefore may be driving the seasonal variation in backscatter in the dry snow zone.