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

Abstract

Seasonal landfast sea ice stretches along most Arctic coastlines and serves as a platform for community travel and subsistence, industry operations, and as a habitat for marine mammals. Landfast ice can feature smooth ice and areas of m-scale roughness in the form of pressure ridges. Such ridges can significantly hamper trafficability, but if grounded can also serve to stabilize the shoreward ice. We investigate the use of synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) to assess the formation and movement of ridges in the landfast sea ice near Utqiaġvik, Alaska. The evaluation is based on the InSAR-derived surface elevation change between two TanDEM-X bistatic image pairs acquired during January 2012. We compare the results with backscatter intensity, coastal radar data, and SAR-derived ice drift and evaluate the utility of this approach and its relevance for evaluation of ridge properties, as well as landfast sea ice evolution, dynamics, and stability. Data Curation, M.M.; Writing-Original Draft Preparation, M.M.; Writing-Review & Editing

Ground-Based Radar Interferometry of Sea Ice

“…Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) missions (e.g., ERS, RADARSAT, Sentinel) have been crucial for providing insight into sea ice properties, e.g., [13], dynamics, e.g., [14], and change relevant for sea ice use and regional assessments [9,15,16]. SAR interferometry (InSAR) can also be used to evaluate sea ice stability [17], deformation [18], fracturing [10], and drift [19]. However, the use of InSAR is limited by data availability as analysis is typically based on a few images with hours to days between acquisitions.…”

Polarimetric Behavior for the Derivation of Sea Ice Topographic Height From TanDEM-X Interferometric SAR Data

“…Focusing on snow-free multi-year ice, the sea ice topographic height derived from TanDEM-X data by InSAR processing shows good agreement with the measurements from laser profiler and photogrammetry [22]. Recently, Marbouti et al assessed the formation and movement of ridges in the landfast sea ice using TanDEM-X InSAR data [23]. Until now, the majority of the published sea ice topographic studies have been based on the InSAR technique, which is an effective tool for height estimation.…”

TanDEM-X multiparametric data features in sea ice classification over the Baltic sea

“…TanDEM-X data were orthorectified using ESA SNAP software. TanDEM-X InSAR-phase ramp was compensated to remove its effect on the classification performance (Sadeghi et al 2014;Solberg et al 2013;Solberg, Weydahl, and Astrup 2015;Marbouti et al 2020). All features were additionally filtered using (7 × 7) boxcar filter.…”