Developing Remote Sensing Capabilities for Meter-Scale Sea Ice Properties

• Main Authors: Polashenski, Chris, Frey, Karen E
• Other Authors: COLD REGIONS RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING LAB FORT WAINWRIGHT AK
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Snow; Ice and Permafrost; Photography; Target Direction; Range and Position Finding; *REMOTE DETECTORS; *SATELLITE IMAGERY; *SEA ICE; INTERPOLATION; MELTING; MELTS; MIXING; PONDS; RESOLUTION; SURFACE ROUGHNESS; Arctic; Ice; permafrost; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA605023; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA605023

The overarching goal of this work is to develop and validate remote sensing techniques to track sea ice physical properties of geophysical importance that occur below the pixel size of most global-coverage satellite assets. We will collect a dataset of high resolution satellite imagery and develop and field-validate methods for detecting melt pond area fraction, floe size distribution, and ice surface roughness from this imagery at a number of sites in the Arctic. The primary objective, in years 1 and 2, is to demonstrate the capability for operationally monitoring these variables. In the 3rd and 4th years of the project, these measurements will be scaled up to basin scale estimates, using both interpolation between observation sites and improved spectral mixing techniques to classify the fractional mixture of surface types within low resolution remote sensing imagery pixels, such as MODIS.