This paper will investigate how new developments in remote sensing and sensor technologies can be applied to image the structure of the sea ice surface. Both segmentation of multipolarimetric synthetic aperture radar images and strategies for the analyses of polarimetric SAR data of sea ice are addressed. The analysis is based on a Radarsat 2 PolSAR scene of from the Fram Strait in September ...

We attempt to understand how a set of well known polari-metric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) features are impacted by the additive system noise for mineral oil and produced water slicks. For this, we use quad-polarimetric SAR scenes from Radarsat-2. Oil slicks at sea can be detected using SAR instruments, and the dual- (HH-VV) and quad-polarimetric modes can provide additional information about the ...

The Arctic sea-ice extent has strongly declined over recent decades. A large inter-annual variability is superimposed on this negative trend. Previous studies have emphasised a significant warming effect associated with latent energy transport into the Arctic region, in particular due to an enhanced greenhouse effect associated with the convergence of the humidity transport over the Arctic. The ...

The effects of both system additive and multiplicative noise on the X-, C-, and L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data covering oil slicks are examined. Prior studies have attempted to characterize such oil slicks, primarily through analysis of polarimetric SAR data. In this article, we factor in system noise that is added to the backscattered signal, introducing artifacts that can easily be ...

An important property associated with turbulence in plasmas and fluids is anomalous transport. Plasma, being a good conductor, can in addition be affected by turbulence causing an anomalous resistivity that can significantly exceed its classical counterpart. While turbulent transport may be adequately described in configuration space, some aspects of the anomalous resistivity are best accounted for ...

The sea area around the Orkney archipelago, Scotland is subjected to substantial maritime shipping activities. By contract, the Svalbard archipelago, Norway currently has a rather low marine traffic profile. Future projections, however, indicate that the Trans-Arctic route might change the whole transportation picture and Svalbard may be at the centre of maritime activities. Both archipelagos ...

A growing number of studies are concluding that the resilience of the Arctic sea ice cover in a warming climate is essentially controlled by its thickness. Satellite radar and laser altimeters have allowed us to routinely monitor sea ice thickness across most of the Arctic Ocean for several decades. However, a key uncertainty remaining in the sea ice thickness retrieval is the error on the sea surface ...

The trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution limits the acquisition of dense time series of Landsat images, and limits the ability to properly monitor land surface dynamics in time. Spatiotemporal image fusion methods provide a cost-efficient alternative to generate dense time series of Landsat-like images for applications that require both high spatial and temporal resolution images. The ...

Because of a spring predictability barrier, the seasonal forecast skill of Arctic summer sea ice is limited by the availability of melt-season sea ice thickness (SIT) observations. The first year-round SIT observations, retrieved from CryoSat-2 from 2011 to 2020, are assimilated into the GFDL ocean–sea ice model. The model's SIT anomaly field is brought into significantly better agreement with the ...

This paper shows that Envisat ASAR data are degraded by a small periodic variation in gain between internal calibration cycles of the antenna, which introduces a significant bias when we try to estimate line-of-sight surface velocities from the estimated Doppler frequency shifts. We investigate the impact of the gain problems on the derived surface velocity product and propose a simple correction ...