Sea Ice Monitoring by Remote Sensing

Abstract

Sea ice is defined as ice which is formed as a result of freezing of seawater. Sea ice occurs at the surface of the ocean in areas where the surface temperature is cooled to the freezing point, which is about −1.8°C for sea water with a salinity of about 35 parts per thousand. Ice formed in lakes and rivers and icebergs coming from glaciers and ice sheets are not defined as sea ice. Monitoring by remote sensing is defined as any measurement technique which can be used to observe sea ice repeatedly by instruments on board earth observation satellites. Monitoring also includes the process of making observational data available for users a short time after the observations have been obtained (i.e. a few hours). Remote sensing of ice can also be done with aircraft, submarines and other vehicles, but these techniques are not discussed in this article.

Sea Ice Remote Sensing Using GNSS-R: A Review

“…where ς l represents the selected singular values of A; u T l b and v l are the left and right singular vectors, respectively. Once Σ is derived using the 2-D TSVD, σ 0 can be obtained from (8). The ambiguity problem is solved by visual inspection on consecutive DDMs acquired within the same track.…”

“…Large-scale sea ice remote sensing data from satellites have been used intensively [8]. Sea ice conditions, such as the extent, drift, growth stage, concentration, and thickness can be estimated from data acquired by passive microwave sensors [9][10][11][12][13], scatterometer [14,15], radar altimeter [3,16,17], and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) [18][19][20].…”

Sea-ice information and forecast needs for industry maritime stakeholders

“…Remote sensing signatures of sea-ice vary seasonally, regionally, and with different types of satellite sensors. Different frequencies provide the ability to interpret surface characteristics, which can be significantly influenced by snow loading, and freezing, and melting phases (Sandven et al, 2006;Webster et al, 2018). When providing sea-ice information for users, it is important to consider types of ice expected to be present during all parts of the season in order to resolve ambiguities in remote sensing data.…”

On Suitability of ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 Dual-Polarized SAR Data for Arctic Sea Ice Parameter Estimation

“…SI attributes are attached to each ice chart polygon by the ice analysts. The attached attributes are described by the polygon-wise World Meteorological Organization (WMO) SI egg code [14], [15], and the ice parameters used in this article have been derived from these polygon attributes. The nominal resolution of ice charts is typically about 1 km, but this only applies for the polygon boundaries, the polygons are typically rather coarsely drawn and only give information on the outlines of the ice situation within a polygon, and many SI details within polygons have been ignored.…”