Journal
MARINE GEODESY
Volume 38, Issue -, Pages 522-533Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC
DOI: 10.1080/01490419.2015.1019655
Keywords
Altimetry; arctic; leads and polynyas; sea ice
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Funding
- French CNES TOSCA SICKAyS
- IDEX Tranversalite InHERA
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Sea ice leads play an essential role in ocean-ice-atmosphere exchange, in ocean circulation, geochemistry, and in ice dynamics. Their precise detection is crucial for altimetric estimations of sea ice thickness and volume. This study evaluates the performance of the SARAL/AltiKa (Satellite with ARgos and ALtiKa) altimeter to detect leads and to monitor their spatio-temporal dynamics. We show that a pulse peakiness parameter (PP) used to detect leads by Envisat RA-2 and ERS-1,-2 altimeters is not suitable because of saturation of AltiKa return echoes over the leads. The signal saturation results in loss of 6-10% of PP data over sea ice. We propose a different parametermaximal power of waveformand define the threshold to discriminate the leads. Our algorithm can be applied from December until May. It detects well the leads of small and medium size from 200m to 3-4km. So the combination of the high-resolution altimetric estimates with low-resolution thermal infra-red or radiometric lead fraction products could enhance the capability of remote sensing to monitor sea ice fracturing.
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