In October 2003 a campaign onboard the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis had the objective to validate standard Aqua Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) sea-ice products. Additionally, the satellite laser altimeter on Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) was in operation. The capture large-scale information of the sea-ice conditions as necessary for satellite validation, the measurement strategy, therefore, was to obtain large-scale sea-ice statistics using extensive sea-ice measurements in a Lagrangian approach. A drifting buoy array spanning initially 50 km × 100 km was surveyed extensively using 50–500 m transects as well as performing random sampling within the buoy array using helicopters. Extrapolation using buoy drift information was utilized to enhance the data volume in time. The results show that ICESat freeboard estimates have a mean difference of 1.8 cm when compared with the in situ data and a correlation coefficient of 0.6. Furthermore, incorporating ICESat roughness information into the AMSR-E snow-depth algorithm significantly improves snow-depth retrievals.