Developing Remote Sensing Capabilities for Meter-Scale Sea Ice Properties

Abstract

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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 30, 2013
Accession Number
ADA605023

Entities

People

  • Chris Polashenski
  • Karen E. Frey

Organizations

  • Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Cloud Cover
  • Detection
  • Geography
  • High Resolution
  • Ice
  • Images
  • Low Resolution
  • Observation
  • Open Water
  • Physical Properties
  • Remote Sensing
  • Satellite Imaging
  • Sea Ice
  • Surface Roughness
  • Synthetic Aperture Radar
  • Water

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Atmospheric Remote Sensing.
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers
  • Polar and Arctic Studies

Technology Areas

  • Space