Sea ice motion and deformation
Sea ice can be found in the Arctic and Antarctic, but also for example in the Gulf of Bothnia and Finland, is very dynamic. The drift velocities of individual ice floes or entire ice fields can vary between almost zero and several kilometers per hour. From time series of satellite images, preferably taken with high spatial resolution radar systems, the drift of the sea ice can be derived. Here, a pattern recognition algorithm is used to search for similar sea ice structures in the sequential satellite images. The resulting displacement of each structure corresponds to its drift in the interval between the image acquisitions (several hours to days).
Ice ridge formation
Gradients in the velocity field can cause deformation of the sea ice, leading to the development of ice ridges. These and other deformation features have a major impact on the interaction between the atmosphere, sea ice and ocean. They also pose dangers for ship traffic. Among other things, our work focuses on the improvement of the accuracy of the ice drift retrieval algorithms and on the quantification of the accuracy of the derived products.
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- Motion tracking of sea ice with SAR satellite data
- Performance of a multiscale correlation algorithm for the estimation of sea-ice drift from SAR images: initial results
- Reliability Measures for Sea Ice Motion Retrieval From Synthetic Aperture Radar Images
- An assessment of the reliability of sea-ice motion and deformation retrieval using SAR images
Contact
Thomas Hollands
Stefanie Linow
Jakob Griebel
Related Topics
Polar Meteorology
Remote sensing technology for the polar regions
Charting the Arctic Tundra
Observation of coastal polynias
Mass loss of the antarctic ice shield
Retrieval of snow accumulation rates
Funding
This project is funded in the framework of the Helmholtz Alliance “Remote Sensing and Earth System Dynamics”. A related study is supported by the AWI Strategy fund.