Sea Ice Monitoring: from single-sensor imagery to multi-sensor data analysis

Abstract:
During the era ofthe European Remote Sensing satellites ERS- 1/ERS-2 the sea ice research community concentrated on understanding which information is provided in single-frequency single-polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Since the start of the Sentinel-1 mission in 2015, dual-polarized C-band imagery has been available for regular sea ice mapping. Already since the early phase of SAR data acquisitions, investigations of satellite and airbome images have been focused on the development of new measurement strategies and methods of data analysis for utilising multi-polarization data, the cornbined analysis ofSAR imagery acquired at different frequencies, and the inclusion of cornplementary data from other types of sensors. In this paper, we specifically address recent investigations on improvements of information retrieval when extending the Sentinel-1 mission with an L-band SAR system and when applying multi-sensor data such as combinations ofSAR and optical or SAR and passive microwave data.