Sentinel-1 contribution to monitoring maritime activity in the Arctic

• Main Authors: SANTAMARIA SERNA Carlos, VAN WIMERSMA GREIDANUS Herman, FOURNIER Melanie, ERIKSEN T., VESPE Michele, ALVAREZ ALVAREZ Marlene, FERNANDEZ ARGUEDAS Virginia, DELANEY Conor Bernard, ARGENTIERI Pietro
• Language: English
• Published: European Space Agency 2016
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC97965

This paper presents results on the use of Sentinel-1 combined with satellite AIS to monitor maritime activity in the Arctic. Such activities are expected to increase, even if not uniformly across the Arctic, as the ice cover in the region retreats due to changes in climate. The objectives of monitoring efforts in the region can vary from country to country, but are generally related to increasing awareness on non-cooperative, small and cruise ships, fisheries, safety at sea, and Search and Rescue. A ship monitoring study has been conducted, involving more than 2,000 Sentinel-1 images acquired during one year in the central Arctic, where the ship densities are high. The main challenges to SAR-based monitoring in this area are described, solutions for some of them are proposed, and analyses of the results are shown. With the high detection thresholds needed to prevent false alarms from sea ice, 16% of the ships detected overall in the Sentinel-1 images have not been correlated to AIS-transmitting ships, and 48% of the AIS-transmitting ships are not correlated to ships detected in the images. JRC.E.6 - Demography, Migration and Governance