The RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System: Quality of Sea Ice Trajectory and Deformation Estimates

Abstract

NASA's RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System (RGPS) uses sequential synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to track the trajectories of some 30 000 points on the Arctic sea ice for periods of up to 6 months. Much of the Arctic basin is imaged and tracked every 3 days. The result is a highly detailed picture of how the sea ice moves and deforms. The points are initially spaced 10 km apart and are organized into four-cornered cells. The area and the strain rates are calculated for each cell for each new observation of its corners. The accuracy of the RGPS ice tracking, area changes, and deformation estimates is needed to make the dataset useful for analysis, model validation, and data assimilation. Two comparisons are made to assess the accuracy. The first compares the tracking performed at two different facilities (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the Alaska SAR Facility in Fairbanks, Alaska), between which the primary difference is the operator intervention. The error standard deviation of the tracking, not including geolocation errors, is 100 m, which is the pixel size of the SAR images. The second comparison is made with buoy trajectories from the International Arctic Buoy Program. The squared correlation coefficient for RGPS and buoy displacements is 0.996. The median magnitude of the displacement differences is 323 m. The tracking errors give rise to error standard deviations of 0.5% day?1 in the divergence, shear, and vorticity. The uncertainty in the area change of a cell is 1.4% due to tracking errors and 3.2% due to resolving the cell boundary with only four points. The uncertainties in the area change and deformation invariants can be reduced substantially by averaging over a number of cells, at the expense of spatial resolution.