Sentinel 1 Radar Data Use to Recognize Thawed/Frozen Soil State in Some Russian Arctic Regions in 2017–2018

This paper deals with the identification of thawed/frozen soils in the topsoil layer for three stations in Russia: Salekhard, Tiksi and Norilsk by using Sentinel 1B C-band radar data for the period of 2017-2018. The determining of the frozen/thawed soil state is carried out in three ways: 1) by multi-temporal radar data on the basis of a significant in 3-5 dB the backscatter coefficient difference in the transition to freezing/thawing soil state, 2) by finding the threshold value of the backscatter coefficient at which the temperature in the topsoil layer falls below 0
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C, 3) by texture features.