A Study on the Radiometric Correction of Sentinel-1 HV Data for Arctic Sea Ice Detection

Abstract

Recently, active research on the Arctic Ocean has been conducted due to the influence of global warming and new Arctic ship route. Although previous studies already calculated quantitative extent of sea ice using passive microwave radiometers, melting at the edge of sea ice and surface roughness were hardly considered due to low spatial resolution. Since Sentienl-1A/B data in Extended Wide (EW) mode are being distributed as free of charge and bulk data for Arctic sea can be generated during a short period, the entire Arctic sea ice data can be covered in high spatial resolution by mosaicking bulk data. However, Sentinel-1A/B data in EW mode, especially in HV polarization, needs significant radiometric correction for further classification. Thus, in this study, we developed algorithms that can correct thermal noise and scalloping effects, and confirmed that Arctic sea ice and open-water were well classified using the corrected dual-polarization SAR data.