Synthetic aperture radar is used to identify and monitor oil spills. Separation from oil spill look-alikes is an important part of a fully automatic oil spill detection scheme. Here we investigate the polarimetric signatures for oil spills and newly formed sea ice (a well-known look-alike) in fully polarimetric Radarsat-2 satellite scenes. Using the fully polarimetric scenes we calculate four different ...

In the Arctic, presence of sea ice presents a challenge to safe and sustainable operations. To optimize planning and minimize impact of inadvertent oil spills, oil-in-ice experiments were performed at the HSVA Arctic Environmental Test Basin (AETB) from 14 March to 4 April 2017. Following an under-ice spill and simulated springtime warming, the microscopic movement and distribution of oil in the sea ...

This letter discusses cross-correlation features de- rived from near-coincident RADARSAT-2 quad-polarimetric and RISAT-1 hybrid-polarity (HP) measurements collected during the NOrwegian Radar oil Spill Experiment in 2015 (NORSE2015). We show that the imaginary part of the cross-correlation between RH and RV is an HP parallel to the real part of the cross-correlation between HH and VV earlier ...

We show that indications of spatial dispersion effects on mineral oil slicks are observed by space-borne multipolarization synthetic aperture radar. This is readily perceived by eye when correlating multipolarization synthetic aperture radar observables with the ship track of the dispersion vessel. We investigate real full-polarimetric (linear transmit/linear receive) as well as simulated and real ...

In this paper, a 2-dimensional scattering model for sea ice based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) is presented. The scattering problem is formulated following a physics-separate strategy. The wave in the air domain is expressed by the scattered field formulation, while the wave in the sea ice domain is expressed by the total field formulation. The two separate physics and formulations are coupled ...

This paper shows initial results from estimating Doppler radial surface velocities (RVLs) over Arctic sea ice using the Sentinel-1A (S1A) satellite. Our study presents the first quantitative comparison between ice drift derived from the Doppler shifts and drift derived using time-series methods over comparable time scales. We compare the Doppler-derived ice velocities with global positioning system ...

Utilizing several Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) missions will provide a data set with higher temporal resolution. It is of great importance to understand the difference between various available sensors and polarization modes and to consider how to homogenize the data sets for a following combined analysis. In this study, a uniform and consistent analysis across different SAR missions is carried ...

The subaperture cross-correlation magnitude (SCM) has previously been proposed as a statistic that improves the contrast between small ship targets and the surrounding sea in synthetic-aperture-radar images. This preprocessing technique utilizes the fast decorrelation of open-water surface ripples on the scale of the SAR wavelength relative to coherent targets such as a ship. However, optimization ...

Estimation of the polarimetric covariance matrix is an important task in statistical modeling of sea clutter for maritime applications of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. This work provides a comprehensive study of four covariance matrix estimators: the maximum likelihood estimators under the Gaussian distribution (G-ML) and the K distribution (K-ML), an approximation of the ...

Using data from the Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument, this paper demonstrates how the high-precision radial surface velocity product, which will become available with the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite, can complement the analysis of sea ice motion. High-resolution Doppler frequency measurements are used to estimate the subsecond line-of-sight motion of ...