Sea Ice Motion Tracking from Near Real Time SAR-data acquired during Antarctic circumnavigation expedition

• Published in: IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium
• Main Authors: Frost, Anja, Wiehle, Stefan, Singha, Suman, Krause, Detmar
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2018
• Subjects: SAR-Signalverarbeitung; Nationales Bodensegment; Antarc*; Antarctic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://elib.dlr.de/118170/; https://elib.dlr.de/118170/1/IGARSS2018-Icedrift-Anja-Frost-V3.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1109/IGARSS.2018.8518249

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites are able to observe small and large scale structures in sea ice - in any weather, through clouds and darkness. In order to assist ship navigation during polar campaigns, we acquired SAR images along the ship course and provided them to navigators on board in near real time, utilizing the operational data processing chain of DLR ground station Neustrelitz. These "exclusive" acquisitions already helped to optimize the routes. SAR data, however, contain more information that is not easily visible, e.g. information about the local sea ice drift. In this paper, we explore the capabilities of a new software processor that is intended to retrieve high resolution sea ice drift fields from pairs of colocated SAR images, combining TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2 images. The processor is foreseen to be integrated into the operational data processing chain at DLR ground station network sites.