Sea ice drift tracking in the Bohai Sea based on optical flow

Abstract

In the Bohai Sea, sea ice drifting is hardly tracked due to the highly sea motion. The long satellite repeat cycles in the polar region are not suitable to the ice drift tracking in the Bohai Sea. The unique characteristics of the Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) allow the tracking of sea ice drift on a daily basis with the use of 1-hour time intervals images (eight images per day). The optical flow method is applied to track the sea ice drift in the Bohai Sea. Experiments have shown that the sea ice vectors from the optical flow method are agreement well with the manually selected reference data.