On the use of the polarization difference to separate young from deformed sea ice in L- and C-band SAR

Abstract

Separation between deformed sea ice and high-backscatter young ice (YI) areas is one of the remaining challenges for automatic classification of sea ice types in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. While high-backscatter areas are usually interpreted and classified as deformed sea ice or multi-year ice, they may at times be new ice or YI areas with a rough surface due to frost flowers, snow crusts, saline snow cover from brine wicking, or finger rafting and small-scale deformation. Here we investigate the usefulness of the polarization difference (PD: VV-HH) for the detection, separation, and characterization of YI areas in L- (ALOS-2) and C-band (RADARSAT-2) SAR images.