Incidence angle dependencies for C-band backscatter from sea ice during both the winter and melt season

Incidence angle normalization is used to reduce the radiometric ambiguity within or between synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. For sea ice, incidence typically constrained winter months because of difficulty capturing rapidly changing backscatter values during melt season. Here, we make use high-temporal-resolution RADASAT Constellation Mission (RCM) SAR images quantify dependencies (slopes) for first-year ice (FYI), second-year (SYI), and multi-year (MYI) several stages melt. We apply a new successive image differencing method mitigate rapid changes in Slopes SYI are shown, first time, winter, most season periods. Time series slopes also at intervals as short thirty minutes. early period (FYI -0.230, -0.191, MYI -0.175 dB/1°) similar those -0.235, -0.208, -0.167 dB/1°). During snow period, remain FYI (-0.235 dB/1°), but become steeper (-0.241 (-0.240 All types reach their maximum slope steepness ponding -0.308, -0.283, -0.289 then shallower again drainage -0.198, -0.207, -0.240 show that melt-season-specific provide important improvements visual interpretation imagery consistency automated classification algorithms.