Feasibility Analysis of Retrieving Sea Ice Surface and Bottom Roughness and Thickness from Polarimetric SAR

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) plays an important role in the refined inversion of sea ice surface, bottom roughness and sea ice thickness. At present, the research on SAR and sea ice morphology is not deep enough, and there is a lack of correlation research on the surface and bottom roughness of sea ice. In response to this problem, this paper uses the sea ice data provided by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and the RadarSat-2 data to analyze the correlation between SAR features and sea ice surface roughness, as well as sea ice surface and bottom roughness. The results show that there is a certain correlation between SAR features and sea ice surface roughness, and the maximum absolute value of the correlation coefficient is 0.764. The roughness of sea ice surface and bottom has a strong correlation, which provides a theoretical basis for inversion of sea ice bottom roughness by SAR. In addition, SAR has great potential in estimating the thickness of deformed ice.