Towards multi-sensor microwave remote sensing of frost flowers on sea ice

It has been hypothesized that frost flowers could be important for tropospheric chemistry and, as a source of sea-salt aerosol, for the interpretation of ice-core data. Furthermore, frost flowers can cause severe errors in sea-ice products derived from remote-sensing data. Up to now there have been few datasets available relating frost-flower distribution and variability in the sea-ice-covered regions. We present a method for frost-flower detection using a combination of active and passive microwave sensors. The vertical polarized C-band radar backscatter of a young sea-ice region covered with frost flowers can be higher than the signal from multi-year ice or from the wind-roughened ocean. Therefore, the classification result of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sea-ice images can be defective due to the influence of frost flowers. The ambiguity of the open-water and frost-flower backscatter signal was successfully resolved using additional information from the 85 GHz Special Sensor Microwave/ Imager (SSM/I) channels. Results of the method were compared to aircraft measurements and observations in the marginal ice zone near Svalbard.