Synergistic Use of Satellite Scatterometer, SAR and Altimeter Data to Study First Year Sea Ice Properties

In this study we demonstrate high potential of synergistic satellite data usage to investigate the Arctic saline sea ice. A simple geometrical optics model is explored to show the possibility to derive the First Year sea ice parameters best fitting the experimental data. Satellite Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are used to analyze the mesoscale sea ice structure and detect the age of the sea ice samples. Sentinel-3 altimeter data along with the Metop Advanced scatterometer (ASCAT) measurements of the normalized radar cross section (NRCS) are jointly used to build the NRCS dependencies on the incidence angle for the selected sea ice samples. Sea ice drift fields are used to investigate only those regions where the drift is negligible on a single day scale. It is shown that the suggested approach presents a powerful tool to study the Arctic sea ice properties.