A New Sea Ice Distribution Detection Method Using GNSS Reflected Signals

Global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R) delay-doppler map (DDM) obtained with TechDemoSat-1 (TDS-1) is used to detect ice presence over Greenland region of Arctic. DDM of sea ice shows less spreading than those of open water as the scattered GNSS signals follow the coherenty scattering model and diffuse scattering model over ice and water respectively. The transition from seawater to sea ice could lead to decrease of the pixel number of DDM. A pixel number ratio of adjacent DDM based detection scheme is proposed through employing a threshold method to distinguish sea ice and sea water, and to analyze sea ice distribution of Greenland region. Sea ice distribution of Greenland with time is analyzed through using multi-period data from TDS-1. The performance of the proposed method is assessed with a mathematical statistical approach through comparing with ground-truth sea ice data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, USA. The effectiveness of this approach is validated with a probability of detection up to 98.76%-99.21%, and the overall probability of detection is 99.09%.