Sea ice monitoring in the Baltic Sea using dual-pol C and L band SAR data

Abstract

Monitoring of ice dynamics and ice type classification is an important task for understanding environmental changes as well as for safe winter navigation. SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) is a powerful spacebourne instrument to detect ridged ice regions as the radar backscatter is strongly influenced by geometrical properties of the ice surface. Data from polarimetric (or dual-pol) SAR sensors like Radarsat-2 and ALOS/Palsar enables to determine more precisely ice types as it contains more information about the ice surface geometry than single polarization images. Use of dual polarization SAR imagery also known as compact polarimetry has shown to be useful as it has reduced the complexity, cost and data rate of SAR image while preserving most of the capabilities of fully polarimetric image.