Sensitivity of Radar Altimeter Waveform to Changes in Sea Ice Type at Resolution of Synthetic Aperture Radar
Wiebke Aldenhoff
1
Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
2
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Remote Sens. 2019, 11(22), 2602; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11222602
Received: 30 September 2019 / Revised: 31 October 2019 / Accepted: 1 November 2019 / Published: 6 November 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Combining Different Data Sources for Environmental and Operational Satellite Monitoring of Sea Ice Conditions)
Radar altimetry in the context of sea ice has mostly been exploited to retrieve basin-scale information about sea ice thickness. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of altimetric waveforms to small-scale changes (a few hundred meters to about 10 km) of the sea ice surface. Near-coincidental synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery and CryoSat-2 altimetric data in the Beaufort Sea are used to identify and study the spatial evolution of altimeter waveforms over these features. Open water and thin ice features are easily identified because of their high peak power waveforms. Thicker ice features such as ridges and multiyear ice floes of a few hundred meters cause a response in the waveform. However, these changes are not reflected in freeboard estimates. Retrieval of robust freeboard estimates requires homogeneous floes in the order of 10 km along-track and a few kilometers to both sides across-track. We conclude that the combination of SAR imagery and altimeter data could improve the local sea ice picture by extending spatially scarce freeboard estimates to regions of similar SAR signature.
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Aldenhoff, W.; Heuzé, C.; Eriksson, L.E.B. Sensitivity of Radar Altimeter Waveform to Changes in Sea Ice Type at Resolution of Synthetic Aperture Radar. Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 2602.
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