Automatic Mapping Technique of Sea Ice in the Coastal Waters of the Arctic Ocean Using Sentinel-1 Data

Abstract

The sea ice information such as ice extent, area, concentration, and thickness has been widely used for analyses of sea level, weather, and climate changes in the Polar Regions. Passive microwave sensing of sea ice traditionally has been applied to the Arctic Ocean for a shipping route support in spite of its low-spatial resolution. C-band Sentinel-1 (constellation of two satellites, Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is considered as one of the effective satellites because it provides an improvement in revisit time, and offers higher resolution and dual polarization (HH and HV). In this study, the Sentinel-1 sea ice mapping system was developed to acquire data automatically for the region of interest in the Arctic coastal region and to map sea ice areas extracted by using the sea ice discrimination algorithm. The system including a data acquisition process can make a sea ice product in 13 minutes. To intuitively understand the distribution of sea ice for safe navigation in coastal waters, the result can be visualized in a KML file that facilitates interfacing with other systems.