Combining Radarsat, Envisat, AMSR-E, and ASPeCt Ship-Based Ice Observations to Determine Ice Concentration at 90°W Longitude in the Bellingshausen Amundsen Sea for SIMBA 2007

1. Abstract The SIMBA cruise in the austral winter season of 2007 conducted in situ measurements and used additional remote sensing resources to study the varied sea ice types at and inside the ice edge of western Antarctica in the Bellingshausen/Amundsen Seas. An element of the research aimed to ground truth satellite measurements by comparing with actual measurements performed on the sea ice. A combination of passive and active satellite data was selected to determine ice concentration and types for the period during and after the trip to see how it seasonally changes for this region. This research will include processing 11 images recorded from the Radarsat-1 instrument provided by the National Ice Center (NIC), and subsequent images from AMSR-E, and Envisat products. Part of the research will be trying to establish how to exactly overlay each image to determine the ice concentration for these three products, using ground-truth data, and GPS coordinates from ASPeCt ship-based ice observations and drifting buoys from the SIMBA cruise. The ENVI image processing program will be used to process the raw data from each satellite product to determine how the ice concentration depicted in the images, relates to backscatter signals.