Preliminary Classification Results of Simulated Radarsat-2 Polarimetric Sea Ice Data

RESUME When RADARSAT-2 is in operation it will be the first commercial spaceborne sensor capable of providing fully polarimetric data. The difference from airborne polarimetric data is mainly due to different sensor specifications and the differences in altitude. Using the airborne data, we simulate RADARSAT-2 standard and fine mode polarimetric data of sea ice and investigate the potential of ice classification algorithms. The increased noise level in combination with the lower resolution of the simulated data causes a decrease in classification quality compared to the airborne result and a change of classification strategy is required. However, the satellite polarimetric data does contain more information than the corresponding single polarization data, and can be exploited by new data processing techniques.