SAR Pancake Ice Thickness Retrieval in the Terra Nova Bay (Antarctica) during the PIPERS Expedition in Winter 2017

Pancake and frazil ice represent an important component of the Arctic and Antarctic cryosphere, especially in marginal ice zones. The retrieval of their thickness by remote sensing is, in general, a dicult task. A processing system was developed and refined by the present authors in the framework of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Giuseppe Aulicino, Peter Wadhams, Flavio Parmiggiani
Other Authors: Aulicino, Giuseppe, Wadhams, Peter, Parmiggiani, Flavio
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2019
Subjects:
SAR
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11367/79588
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11212510
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/11/21/2510/htm
Description
Summary:Pancake and frazil ice represent an important component of the Arctic and Antarctic cryosphere, especially in marginal ice zones. The retrieval of their thickness by remote sensing is, in general, a dicult task. A processing system was developed and refined by the present authors in the framework of the EU SPICES project; it is meant for routinely deriving ice thickness in frazil-pancake regions using the spectral changes in wave spectra from imagery provided by space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems. This methodology was successfully tested in the Beaufort Sea through comparison with ground truth collected during the cruise of the “Sikuliaq” in the fall of 2015. In the present study, this technique has been adapted and applied to Antarctic frazil/pancake icefields using COSMO-SkyMed satellite images. Our retrievals were analyzed and validated through a comparison with co-located in situ observations collected during the 2017 PIPERS cruise in Terra Nova Bay polynya. A broad agreement was found between measured thicknesses and those retrieved from the SAR analysis. Results and statistics presented and discussed in detail in this study represent a step towards the autonomous measurement of pancake icefields in remote areas such as Antarctic coastal polynyas and marginal ice zones.