Accurate identification of sea ice type from altimeter data is important for inversion of sea ice freeboard by radar altimeter, as well as for maritime navigation in polar regions. Previous sea ice classification studies have rarely involved multifrequency altimeter data. In this study, benefiting from the dual-frequency observation capability of the Chinese HY-2B altimeter, differences between waveform features of C-and Kuband radar altimeter over different types of sea ice were investigated and analyzed for the first time. To validate and evaluate the sea ice classification capability of different feature combinations of the different bands, we extracted 14 features from the waveforms of C-and Ku-band HY-2B altimeter data acquired between December 2019 and April 2020. Our experiments demonstrated that the C-and Ku-band radar waveforms are sensitive to sea ice type, and that sea ice type classification could be improved by combining Ku-and C-band data. This work also proposed a sea ice classification methodology using C-and Kuband altimeter waveforms. Comparison with results from previous studies indicated that the overall accuracy of the proposed method (up to 93.45%) is much higher than that of existing state-of-the-art methods.Index Terms-dual-band radar altimeter, HY-2B, sea ice classification, waveform features.
I. INTRODUCTIONITH climate change, drastic changes in Arctic sea ice have had global impact that cannot be ignored. Sea ice type and thickness is an important parameter used to describe the state of sea ice, and it is of considerable importance in relation to global climate change research, Arctic ecology, and monitoring of navigational safety in polar regions [1][2]. In comparison with in situ surveys, microwave remote sensing has received increasing attention recently owing to its near all-Manuscript received XXX.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.