Sea ice detection from GNSS-R Delay-Doppler Map

In this paper, a scheme is presented for sea ice detection from Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSS-R) Delay-Doppler Map (DDM). It is found that the DDM of sea ice differs from the one of seawater in the aspect of delay and Doppler spreading. This enables to distinguish sea ice from seawater through studying the number of high-value (greater than 50% of the peak power) DDM pixels. The area associated with a DDM with a number of high-value pixels less and greater than an empirical threshold (12) will be classified as covered by sea ice and seawater, respectively. The proposed method is validated by comparing the DDM-based detection results with ground-truth sea ice data and a detection accuracy of 100% is achieved.