New article: Combined observations of Arctic sea ice with near-coincident colocated X-band, C-band, and L-band SAR satellite remote sensing and helicopter-borne measurements

The paper “Combined observations of Arctic sea ice with near-coincident colocated X-band, C-band, and L-band SAR satellite remote sensing and helicopter-borne measurements” by Malin Johansson, Jennifer King, Anthony Doulgeris, Sebastian Gerland, Suman Singha, Gunnar Spreen and Thomas Busche, has been published by the Journal of Geophysichal Research Oceans.

Abstract

In this study, we compare colocated near-coincident X-, C-, and L-band fully polarimetry SAR satellite images with helicopter-borne ice thickness measurements acquired during the Norwegian Young sea ICE 2015 (N-ICE2015) expedition in the region of the Arctic Ocean north of Svalbard in April 2015. The air-borne surveys provide near-coincident snow plus ice thickness, surface roughness data, and photographs. This unique data set allows us to investigate how the different frequencies can complement one another for sea ice studies, but also to raise awareness of limitations. X-band and L-band satellite scenes were shown to be a useful complement to the standard SAR frequency for sea ice monitoring (C-band) for lead ice and newly formed sea ice identification. This may be in part be due to the frequency but also the high spatial resolution of these sensors. We found a relatively low correlation between snow plus ice thickness and surface roughness. Therefore, in our dataset ice thickness cannot directly be observed by SAR which has important implications for operational ice charting based on automatic segmentation.

Reference:

Johansson, Malin; King, Jennifer; Doulgeris, Anthony Paul; Gerland, Sebastian; Singha, Suman; Spreen, Gunnar; Busche, Thomas. Combined observations of Arctic sea ice with near-coincident colocated X-band, C-band, and L-band SAR satellite remote sensing and helicopter-borne measurements. Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans 2016; Volum 122. ISSN 2169-9275.s doi: 10.1002/2016JC012273.