Abstract
Knowledge of sea ice is critical for offshore oil and gas exploration, global shipping industries, and climate change studies. During recent decades, Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSS-R) has evolved as an efficient tool for sea ice remote sensing. In particular, thanks to the availability of the TechDemoSat-1 (TDS-1) data over high-latitude regions, remote sensing of sea ice based on spaceborne GNSS-R has been rapidly growing. The goal of this paper is to provide a review of the state-of-the-art methods for sea ice remote sensing offered by the GNSS-R technique. In this review, the fundamentals of these applications are described, and their performances are evaluated. Specifically, recent progress in sea ice sensing using TDS-1 data is highlighted including sea ice detection, sea ice concentration estimation, sea ice type classification, sea ice thickness retrieval, and sea ice altimetry. In addition, studies of sea ice sensing using airborne and ground-based data are also noted. Lastly, applications based on various platforms along with remaining challenges are summarized and possible future trends are explored. In this review, concepts, research methods, and experimental techniques of GNSS-R-based sea ice sensing are delivered, and this can benefit the scientific community by providing insights into this topic to further advance this field or transfer the relevant knowledge and practice to other studies.
Highlights
A strong decline of Arctic sea ice has been reported during the last decades [1,2,3], and this phenomenon coincides with global warming [4]
Due to the availability of massive spaceborne Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSS-R) data, more investigations and verifications have been made for their applications in sea ice sensing than using airborne and ground-based data in the literature
This review focuses more on the topic of sea ice sensing using spaceborne GNSS-R data
Summary
A strong decline of Arctic sea ice has been reported during the last decades [1,2,3], and this phenomenon coincides with global warming [4]. Large-scale sea ice remote sensing data from satellites have been used intensively [8]. Sea ice remote sensing using GNSS-R was first demonstrated by [58] with an airborne GPS Rx. Since several ground-based and airborne experiments have been accomplished with promising results [56,57,59,60,61]. The first spaceborne GNSS-R measurement was carried out during the UK Disaster Monitoring Constellation (UK-DMC) mission in 2004 showing its capability of sea ice remote sensing. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 contains a review of sea ice sensing applications based on the spaceborne instruments.
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