Present Status of SAR Sea Ice Algorithms.

Abstract : This report will summarize the current work being done to extract geophysical information from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of sea ice. There are many ways of organizing such a summary and we have chosen to divide it into three main areas; sea ice image classification, ice kinematics and sea ice image characterization. Image classification refers to algorithms that subset the pixels within an image based on an estimation of the type of sea ice (of course, we are including water as a type of sea ice) that pixel came from. Ice kinematics refers to algorithms that extract velocity vectors from the images that estimate the movement of the ice. Image characterization refers basically to everything else; i.e., algorithms that attempt to extract any other geophysical parameters from the images except ice type or ice motion. For each of these areas we will describe the algorithms currently being applied, mention their advantages and disadvantages when known, and report any error analysis that has been performed to test how well the algorithms actually work. References will be given where we have found them, but much of this work is ongoing and thus has not been published but rather has been discussed at workshops or with individual communications.