Spaceborne radar measurements of sea ice parameters for climate models (Climatice)

Research Project, 2010 – 2013

The focus has been on improvements of algorithms for estimation of ice thickness, ice concentration and ice drift. The main area of interest was the Arctic region, with special focus on the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard. Validation data have been collected during participation in three field expeditions with the Norwegian Polar Institute to the Fram Strait. The most important improvements in the algorithm development were:
- To cope with heterogeneous sea ice motion at the marginal ice zone, the sea ice drift algorithm has been extended with a feature tracking module. Generated sea ice products were compared to model simulations from the ocean circulation model HIROMB.
- For retrieval of sea ice concentration in the Arctic summer, the project evaluated whether L-band images can be used to improve separation of wet surface ice from open water and compared the result for C-band.
- Retrackers were implemented for the Cryosat radar altimeter data with the purpose to extract geophysical parameters, most importantly sea ice thickness.
The work was performed under two contracts, SNSB Dnr. 113/09 (2010-2011) and SNSB Dnr. 149/11 (2012-2013). The two Climatice projects have resulted in one PhD thesis, four peer reviewed scientific journal papers and a number of conference presentations.