Abstract. We examine the variability of sea ice freeboard, snow depth, and ice thickness in three years (2011, 2014, and 2016) of repeat surveys of an IceBridge (OIB) transect across the Weddell Sea. Averaged over this transect, ice thickness ranges from 2.4 ± 1.07 (2011) to 2.60 ± 1.15 m (2014), and snow depth from 30.0 ± 8.51 (2016) to 43.6 ± 10.2 cm (2014); suggesting a highly variable but broadly thicker ice cover compared to that inferred from drilling and ship-based measurements. Spatially, snow depth and ice thickness are higher in the more deformed ice of the western Weddell. Radar freeboards (uncompensated for snow thickness) from CryoSat-2 (CS-2), sampled along the same transect, are consistently higher (by up to 8 cm) than those computed using OIB data. This suggests radar scattering that originates above the snow-ice interface, possibly due to salinity in the basal layer of the snow column. Consequently, sea ice thickness computed using snow depth estimates solely from differencing OIB and CS-2 freeboards (without snow radar) are therefore general higher; mean differences in sea ice thickness along a transect are up to ~ 0.6 m higher (in 2014). This analysis is relevant to the use of differences between ICESat-2 and CS-2 freeboards to estimate snow depth for ice sea thickness calculations. Our analysis also suggests that, even with these expected biases, this is an improvement over the assumption that snow depth is equal to the total freeboard, where the underestimation of thickness could be up to a meter. Importantly, better characterization of the source of these biases is critical for obtaining improved estimates and understanding limits of retrievals of Weddell Sea ice thickness from satellite altimeters.