Feasibility Study on Estimation of Sea Ice Drift from KOMPSAT-5 and COSMO-SkyMed SAR Images

Jeong-Won Park,Hyangsun Han,Chang-Uk Hyun,Anton Korosov,Seung Hee Kim,Denis Demchev,Stefano Zecchetto,Young-Joo Kwon,Hyun-Cheol Kim

doi:10.3390/rs13204038

Abstract

Estimating the sea ice drift field is of importance in both scientific study and activities in the polar ocean. Ice motion is being tracked at large scale (10 km and larger) on a daily basis; however, a higher resolution product is desirable for more reliable monitoring of rapid changes in sea ice. The use of wide-swath SAR has been extensively studied; yet, recent high-resolution X-band SAR sensors have not been tested enough. We examine the feasibility of KOMPSAT-5 and COSMO-SkyMed for retrieving sea ice motion by using the dataset of the MOSAiC expedition. The ice drift match-ups extracted from consecutive SAR image pairs and buoys for more than seven months in the central Arctic were used for a performance evaluation and validation. In addition to individual tests for KOMPSAT-5 and COSMO-SkyMed, a cross-sensor combination of two sensors was tested to overcome the drawback, a relatively long revisit time of high-resolution SAR. The experimental results show that higher accuracies are achievable from both single- and cross-sensor configurations of high-resolution X-band SARs compared to wide-swath C-band SARs, and that sub-daily monitoring is feasible from the cross-sensor approach.

Highlights

Sea ice is a dynamic component of the Earth’s cryosphere that varies over time and space in response to winds and ocean currents
A substantial decline in Arctic sea ice thickness has been observed for the last decades: −0.58 ± 0.07 m per decade over the period of 2000–2012 [8]
The datasets from the two cross-sensor was tested to evaluate the feasibility of a multi-sensor approach for increassensors were processed separately in order to intercompare their results

Summary

Introduction

Sea ice is a dynamic component of the Earth’s cryosphere that varies over time and space in response to winds and ocean currents. Since it plays an important role in the energy balancing between the ocean and atmosphere [1,2], it is one of the most sensitive indicators of climate change. From a dynamic point of view, the drift of sea ice influences the local redistribution of ice thickness [5,6], which in turn indirectly controls the localized ice–water phase change. A substantial decline in Arctic sea ice thickness has been observed for the last decades: −0.58 ± 0.07 m per decade over the period of 2000–2012 [8]. As the increased mobility enhances ice deformation [10] and the regional variability is significant, the need

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Conclusion