Microwave scattering from artificial sea ice pressure ridges
Microwave scattering from artificial sea ice pressure ridges
Sea ice pressure ridges are important ice features to navigation, climatological studies, and offshore exploration. Ice operations such as these prefer to operate in areas of open water or thin ice, and to completely avoid potentially unmanageable rough ice features, such as icebergs, multiyear ice floes, and sea ice pressure ridges. This field project aims to undertake a first of a kind experiment that will look in situ at how microwave backscatter over sea ice pressure ridges changes when snow cover, radar incidence angle, and ridge height parameters change. Understanding how microwave scattering interacts in situ with pressure ridges can then be scaled up to understand radar returns in microwave satellite imagery for use in ridge identification and understanding various parameters of areas of ridging. Ridges will be sampled opportunistically over two experiments using a C-band microwave scatterometer, a LiDAR laser scanner, and physical ice/snow sampling equipment. The data collected during this project will advance the current knowledge of how pressure ridges interact with microwaves, generating new and important information in the field of microwave remote sensing of sea ice.
Field site: Sea-ice Environmental Research Facility (SERF), University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Project lead: M. Shields
PI: D. Barber
Project participants: Megan Shields (CEOS); Kerri Warner (CEOS); Dr. Randall Scharien (CEOS); Dr. David Barber (CEOS)