Karvonen, Juha (2015). Evaluation of the operational SAR based Baltic Sea ice concentration products. ADVANCES IN SPACE RESEARCH, 56(1), 119-132.

Abstract
Sea ice concentration is an important ice parameter both for weather and climate modeling and sea ice navigation. We have developed an fully automated algorithm for sea ice concentration retrieval using dual-polarized ScanSAR wide mode RADARSAT-2 data. RADARSAT-2 is a C-band SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) instrument enabling dual-polarized acquisition in ScanSAR mode. The swath width for the RADARSAT-2 ScanSAR mode is about 500 km, making it very suitable for operational sea ice monitoring. The polarization combination used in our concentration estimation is HH/HV. The SAR data is first preprocessed; the preprocessing consists of geo-rectification to Mercator projection, incidence angle correction for both the polarization channels, and SAR mosaicking. After preprocessing a segmentation is performed for the SAR mosaics, and some features are computed for each SAR segment. Finally the SAR concentration is estimated based on these segment-wise features. The algorithm is basically similar as introduced in Karvonen 2014. The ice concentration is computed daily using a daily RADARSAT-2 SAR mosaic as its input, and it thus gives the concentration estimated at each grid cell (pixel) based on the most recent SAR data at the location. The algorithm has been run in an operational test mode since January 2014. We present evaluation of the SAR-based concentration estimates for the Baltic ice season 2014 by comparing the SAR results with gridded Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) ice charts and ice concentration estimates from a radiometer algorithm. (C) 2015 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

DOI:
10.1016/j.asr.2015.03.039

ISSN:
0273-1177