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A review of the main approaches developed for sea ice classification using satellite imagery is presented. Satellite data are the main and very often only information source for sea ice classification and charting in the remote arctic regions. The main techniques used for ice classification and ice charting in several national ice services are considered. Advantages and disadvantages of various SAR data-based methods for ice classification are analyzed. It is shown that an increase of SAR technical abilities contributes to the enhancement of sea ice classification reliability. The possible further development of satellite data-based methods for ice classification is discussed.

Abstract. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from RADARSAT-2 (RS2) in dual-polarization mode provide additional information for discriminating sea ice and open water compared to single-polarization data. We have developed an automatic algorithm based on dual-polarized RS2 SAR images to distinguish open water (rough and calm) and sea ice. Several technical issues inherent in RS2 data were solved in the pre-processing stage, including thermal noise reduction in HV polarization and correction of angular backscatter dependency in HH polarization. Texture features were explored and used in addition to supervised image classification based on the support vector machines (SVM) approach. The study was conducted in the ice-covered area between Greenland and Franz Josef Land. The algorithm has been trained using 24 RS2 scenes acquired in winter months in 2011 and 2012, and the results were validated against manually derived ice charts of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. The algorithm was applied on a total of 2705 RS2 scenes obtained from 2013 to 2015, and the validation results showed that the average classification accuracy was 91 ± 4 %.

Abstract. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from RADARSAT-2 (RS2) taken in dual-polarization mode provide additional information for discriminating sea ice and open water compared to single-polarization data. We have developed a fully automatic algorithm to distinguish between open water (rough/calm) and sea ice based on dual-polarized RS2 SAR images. Several technical problems inherent in RS2 data were solved on the pre-processing stage including thermal noise reduction in HV-polarization channel and correction of angular backscatter dependency on HH-polarization. Texture features are used as additional information for supervised image classification based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) approach. The main regions of interest are the ice-covered seas between Greenland and Franz Josef Land. The algorithm has been trained using 24 RS2 scenes acquired during winter months in 2011 and 2012, and validated against the manually derived ice chart product from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Between 2013 and 2015, 2705 RS2 scenes have been utilised for validation and the average classification accuracy has been found to be 91 ± 4 %.