Feasibility Study on Estimation of Sea Ice Drift from KOMPSAT-5 and COSMO-SkyMed SAR Images

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Jeong-Won Park, Hyun-Cheol Kim, Anton Korosov, Denis Demchev, Stefano Zecchetto, Seung Hee Kim, Young-Joo Kwon, Hyangsun Han, Chang-Uk Hyun
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021
• Subjects: KOMPSAT-5; COSMO-SkyMed; sea ice drift; synthetic aperture radar; cross-sensor; Science; Q; Arctic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13204038; https://doaj.org/article/ad26d07a57ac4b1aacd700d14bc7762f

Estimating the sea ice drift field is of importance in both scientific study and activities in the polar ocean. Ice motion is being tracked at large scale (10 km and larger) on a daily basis; however, a higher resolution product is desirable for more reliable monitoring of rapid changes in sea ice. The use of wide-swath SAR has been extensively studied; yet, recent high-resolution X-band SAR sensors have not been tested enough. We examine the feasibility of KOMPSAT-5 and COSMO-SkyMed for retrieving sea ice motion by using the dataset of the MOSAiC expedition. The ice drift match-ups extracted from consecutive SAR image pairs and buoys for more than seven months in the central Arctic were used for a performance evaluation and validation. In addition to individual tests for KOMPSAT-5 and COSMO-SkyMed, a cross-sensor combination of two sensors was tested to overcome the drawback, a relatively long revisit time of high-resolution SAR. The experimental results show that higher accuracies are achievable from both single- and cross-sensor configurations of high-resolution X-band SARs compared to wide-swath C-band SARs, and that sub-daily monitoring is feasible from the cross-sensor approach.