Baltic Sea Ice Concentration Estimation Based on C-Band Dual-Polarized SAR Data

High-resolution ice concentration information is required for navigation purposes, validating ice models, and data assimilation. The currently available operational ice concentration products are based on microwave radiometer data, and their typical resolution is several kilometers. We present an algorithm for the estimation of ice concentration based on dual-polarized (HH/HV) C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The algorithm is based on the multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network. Ice concentration estimated based on the HH channel is used as one MLP input, and the local incidence angle is used as another. The additional inputs are based on the HV channel. Digitized Finnish Ice Service ice charts, which were also used as the training data, the SAR-based HH-channel ice concentration, and the ice concentration based on a radiometer algorithm are used as reference data sets. The results for the dual-polarized algorithm show improvement compared to the algorithm based on HH-polarized SAR data only.