Discrimination of Arctic multi-year ice from first-year ice using SCATSAT-1 data

98-104The distinctive dielectric properties of multi-year ice that make it stand out from the first-year ice has been exploited in this study to discriminate the Arctic multi-year ice from the first-year ice. We have used the backscattering coefficient, the brightness temperature and the gamma-naught data from the ISRO's miniature satellite SCATSAT-1 for this study. Principal component analysis in conjunction with the ISODATA unsupervised classification technique has been used to achieve the goal of this study. The classification results so obtained have been compared with a well-established sea ice type data product from the EUMETSAT's Ocean & Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility. Moreover, we have employed a change detection technique to ascertain the changes in the Arctic multi-year ice for the SCATSAT-1 period 2016 through 2018 (autumn and spring changes)

Discrimination of Arctic multi-year ice from first-year ice using SCATSAT-1 data

The distinctive dielectric properties of multi-year ice that make it stand out from the first-year ice has been exploited in this study to discriminate the Arctic multi-year ice from the first-year ice. We have used the backscattering coefficient, the brightness temperature and the gamma-naught data from the ISRO's miniature satellite SCATSAT-1 for this study. Principal component analysis in conjunction with the ISODATA unsupervised classification technique has been used to achieve the goal of this study. The classification results so obtained have been compared with a well-established sea ice type data product from the EUMETSAT's Ocean & Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility. Moreover, we have employed a change detection technique to ascertain the changes in the Arctic multi-year ice for the SCATSAT-1 period 2016 through 2018 (autumn and spring changes)

Antarctic Sea Ice Extent from ISRO’s SCATSAT-1 Using PCA and An Unsupervised Classification

Indian Space Research Organisation’s SCATSAT-1 is a continuity mission for Oceansat-2 Scatterometer. The sensor works in a Ku-band (13.515 GHz) similar to the one flown on-board Oceansat-2. It provides backscattering coefficient over the globe and wind vector data products over the oceans that are useful for weather forecasting, cyclone detection, and tracking services. Besides backscattering coefficient (sigma nought), two other important parameters, namely, Gamma nought (obtained from backscattering coefficient) and Brightness temperature (obtained from scatterometer noise measurement) are given as the Level-4 data products archived at the ISRO’s Meteorological & Oceanographic Satellite Data Archival Centre. We used these three parameters both in horizontal and vertical polarizations for the Antarctic region (South Polar) to perform, first, a principal component analysis. Then, we used the first three principal components explaining the largest variability in the data set to perform an unsupervised ISODATA clustering classification to estimate the regions of sea ice around Antarctica. The derived sea ice extent through this method is compared with other popular sea ice extent products available elsewhere