A Study of Landfast Ice with Sentinel-1 Repeat-Pass Interferometry over the Baltic Sea

Abstract

Mapping of fast ice displacement and investigating sea ice rheological behavior is a major open topic in coastal ice engineering and sea ice modeling. This study presents first results on Sentinel-1 repeat-pass space borne synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) in the Gulf of Bothnia over the fast ice areas. An InSAR pair acquired in February 2015 with a temporal baseline of 12 days has been studied here in detail. According to our results, the surface of landfast ice in the study area was stable enough to preserve coherence over the 12-day baseline, while previous InSAR studies over the fast ice used much shorter temporal baselines. The advantage of longer temporal baseline is in separating the fast ice from drift ice and detecting long term trends in deformation maps. The interferogram showed displacement of fast ice on the order of 40 cm in the study area. Parts of the displacements were attributed to forces caused by sea level tilt, currents, and thermal expansion, but the main factor of the displacement seemed to be due to compression of the drift ice driven by southwest winds with high speed. Further interferometric phase and the coherence measurements over the fast ice are needed in the future for understanding sea ice mechanism and establishing sustainability of the presented InSAR approach for monitoring dynamics of the landfast ice with Sentinel-1 data.

Mapping pan-Arctic landfast sea ice stability using Sentinel-1 interferometry

“…During the last century, an expansion of transportation and resource extraction have led to increased human presence in the Arctic and further diversification of ice use (Eicken et al, 2009). The recent retreat of sea ice observed over the past several decades (Stroeve et al, 2012;Comiso and Hall, 2014;Meier et al, 2014) has already resulted in widespread consequences for ice users (ACIA, 2004;Aporta and Higgs, 2005;Fienup-Riordan and Rearden, 2010;Orviku et al, 2011;Druckenmiller et al, 2013), as well as increasing hazards (Ford et al, 2008;Eicken and Mahoney, 2015). At the same time, the related increased accessibility to Arctic waters (Stephenson et al, 2011) is leading to more ship traffic and resource exploration (Lovecraft and Eicken, 2011;Eguíluz et al, 2016).…”

Evaluating Landfast Sea Ice Ridging near UtqiaġVik Alaska Using TanDEM-X Interferometry

“…The majority of the published InSAR studies focus on landfast ice, which under favorable conditions allows the use of repeat pass InSAR without complete decorrelation e.g., [18,25,[53][54][55].…”

Estimation of Arctic land-fast ice cover based on dual-polarized Sentinel-1 SAR imagery

“…From time series of ice drift estimates it is possible to derive the static ice areas which can then be interpreted as LFI, assuming the time series of ice drift at a certain location is long enough. Also SAR interferometry can be used for LFI detection (Meyer et al, 2011;Marbouti et al, 2017), as the phase difference is random for drift ice and coherent for the static ice fields. However, the availability of Single Look Complex (SLC) SAR data required for SAR interferometry is currently restricted, and thus methods based on SAR interferometry are not yet suitable for LFI monitoring in a large spatial scale.…”