Arctic sea ice motion and deformation measurements using high-resolution optical satellite images

Abstract

Sea ice motion and deformation have been measured using low-resolution microwave remote sensing to monitor wide polar area. This study presents an application of high-resolution optical satellite images for sea ice motion and deformation measurements. The sea ice motion was measured by using image block matching technique with hierarchical approach to enhance computing performance and multi-temporal images acquired from multiple spaceborne sensors of Korea Multi-Purpose Satellites (KOMPSATs). The sea ice motion extracted from image pairs of short time intervals were compared with in-situ buoy location records. The errors indicate more accurate measurements than from the sea ice motion datasets from conventional low-resolution microwave data. In the results of sea ice deformation, free drift patterns of ice floes were delineated from the high-resolution satellite images. The results demonstrate that using high-resolution optical images from operational satellites enabled accurate sea ice motion measurement, thus this approach could be used for expanding sea ice motion and deformation dataset.