Fusion of satellite active and passive microwave data for sea ice type concentration estimates

Journal Article · Sun Sep 01 04:00:00 EDT 1996 · IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/36.536534· OSTI ID:404379

Beaven, S G ^[1]; Gogineni, S ^[2]; Carsey, F D ^[3]

---

1. Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center, San Diego, CA (United States). Research, Development, Test and Evaluation Div.
2. Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence, KS (United States)
3. California Inst. of Tech., Pasadena, CA (United States). Jet Propulsion Lab.

Young first-year sea ice is nearly as important as open water in modulating heat flux between the ocean and atmosphere in the Arctic. Just after the onset of freeze-up, first-year ice is in the early stages of growth and will consist of young first-year and thin ice. The distribution of sea ice in this thickness range impacts heat transfer in the Arctic. Therefore, improving the estimates of ice concentrations in this thickness range is significant. NASA Team Algorithm (NTA) for passive microwave data inaccurately classifies sea ice during the melt and freeze-up seasons because it misclassifies multiyear ice as first-year ice. The authors developed a hybrid fusion technique for incorporating multiyear ice information derived form synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images into a passive microwave algorithm to improve ice type concentration estimates. First, they classified SAR images using a dynamic thresholding technique and estimated the multiyear ice concentration. Then they used the SAR-derived multiyear ice concentration constrain the NTA and obtained an improved first-year ice concentration estimate. They computed multiyear and first-year ice concentration estimates over a region in the eastern-central Arctic in which field observations of ice and in situ radar backscatter measurements were performed. With the NTA alone, the first-year ice concentration in the study area varied between 0.11 and 0.40, while the multiyear ice concentration varied form 0.63 to 0.39. With the hybrid fusion technique, the first-year ice concentration varied between 0.08 and 0.23 and the multiyear ice concentration was between 0.62 and 0.66. The fused estimates of first-year and multiyear ice concentration appear to be more accurate than NTA, based on ice observations that were logged aboard the US Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star in the study area during 1991.

• OSTI ID: 404379
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 34; ISSN IGRSD2; ISSN 0196-2892
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
AGE DEPENDENCE
ARCTIC OCEAN
CALCULATION METHODS
CLIMATIC CHANGE
DISTRIBUTION
ICE
REMOTE SENSING