Polarimetric SAR observation of sea ice in the Sea of Okhotsk

摘要

We have acquired ground truth data at Lake Saroma and its surrounding area since 1993 in order to collect data on regional sea ice in the Sea of Okhotsk. The data was acquired in 1999 by Polarimetric and Interferometric SAR (PI-SAR), a dual-frequency, fully polarimetric airborne SAR system jointly developed by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) and the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL), simultaneously with ground experiments. This paper describes the results of polarimetric data analysis of typical sea ice observed in the off-shore region near Lake Saroma. Considering sea ice classification capability by using L-band polarimetric SAR data, we found that the correlation coefficients between RR and LL, polarimetric entropy, and polarimetric anisotropy were candidates for discriminating three ice types as well as open water at small incidence angles.