A sea ice concentration estimation algorithm utilizing radiometer and SAR data

Abstract. We have studied the possibility of combining the high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) segmentation and ice concentration estimated by radiometer brightness temperatures. Here we present an algorithm for mapping a radiometer-based concentration value for each SAR segment. The concentrations are estimated by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network which has the AMSR-2 (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2) polarization ratios and gradient ratios of four radiometer channels as its inputs. The results have been compared numerically to the gridded Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) ice chart concentrations and high-resolution AMSR-2 ASI (ARTIST Sea Ice) algorithm concentrations provided by the University of Hamburg and also visually to the AMSR-2 bootstrap algorithm concentrations, which are given in much coarser resolution. The differences when compared to FMI daily ice charts were on average small. When compared to ASI ice concentrations, the differences were a bit larger, but still small on average. According to our comparisons, the largest differences typically occur near the ice edge and sea–land boundary. The main advantage of combining radiometer-based ice concentration estimation and SAR segmentation seems to be a more precise estimation of the boundaries of different ice concentration zones.