Shipborne radar backscatter measurements from arctic sea ice during the fall freeze‐up

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
C‐band radar backscatter from sea ice goes through dramatic changes during the transition from summer melt into fall freeze‐up. Measurements taken from a shipborne scatterometer during the International Arctic Ocean Expedition (IAOE) ‘91 show that the backscatter increases by 13–18 dB at incidence angles from 25° to 35° during the early stages of freeze‐up. This increase in backscatter is shown to be primarily due to enhanced volume scattering. The re‐freezing of moisture on or near the surface is believed to be the cause of this enhanced volume scatter. Backscatter data were taken aboard the US Coast Guard Icebreaker Polar Star with an FM‐CW radar system, built at the University of Kansas Radar Systems and Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL). We applied a coherent noise reduction scheme to these data to improve the quality of the measurements and to remove systematic noise sources that corrupt the measurements. This scheme reduces coherent noise sources by 10 to 20 dB.

This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit: