Assessment of Simulated Compact Polarimetry of the High Resolution Radarsat Constellation Mission SAR Mode for Multiyear and First Year Sea Ice Characterization
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Dabboor, Mohammed; Montpetit, Benoit; Howell, Stephen
- Source
- IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International. :2420-2423 Jul, 2018
- Subject
- Aerospace
Computing and Processing
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Geoscience
Photonics and Electrooptics
Signal Processing and Analysis
Synthetic aperture radar
Sea ice
Feature extraction
Meteorology
Correlation
Backscatter
compact polarimetric SAR
sea ice
- Language
- ISSN
- 2153-7003
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing has become a valuable tool for sea ice characterization. Operational sea ice monitoring usually relies on SAR data from single- or dual-polarized beam modes such as the ScanSAR mode of RADARSAT-2. However, such imagery cannot accurately discriminate certain sea ice types and open water states at all times during the year. Thus, the recently proposed compact polarimetric (CP) SAR configuration for Earth observation could be a compromised choice for operational sea ice observation. This configuration will be included in the future RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM). In this study, simulated CP SAR data of the RCM High Resolution (HR) SAR mode is evaluated for sea ice classification. Results indicate promising performance of the RCM HR mode for First Year Ice (FYI) and Multiyear Ice (MYI) classification using CP SAR data.