Comparison of Doppler-Derived Sea Ice Radial Surface Velocity Measurement Methods From Sentinel-1A IW Data

Abstract

The near-instantaneous radial velocity of a target can be obtained using the Doppler effect of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which is widely used in ocean current retrieval. However, in sea ice drift velocity measurements, only a Doppler centroid estimation algorithm in frequency domain has been studied, so whether there is a better algorithm is worth exploring. In this article, based on Sentinel-1A interferometric wide data, three Doppler centroid estimation algorithms applied to ocean current retrieval are selected. Combined with the characteristics of the Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans mode, made two applicability adjustments to each algorithm, and finally applied the three algorithms to sea ice radial surface velocity measurements. The first adjustment is to explore and determine the optimal parameters. The second adjustment is to use parallel computing to improve the efficiency, which is improved by an average of 43.55%. In addition, the deviation of Doppler centroid estimation bias correction is verified using rainforest data, and the deviation is controlled at approximately 3 Hz. Based on the three algorithms, five sets of experiments are carried out in this article. By analyzing and comparing the results of each algorithm, it is found that the results of the three algorithms are relatively consistent, among which the correlation Doppler estimation algorithm has the advantages of high efficiency and high precision and is the most suitable method for sea ice drift measurement among the three methods. However, for SAR images with abnormal speckles caused by human activities, the sign Doppler estimation algorithm can effectively remove abnormal speckles and ensure the smoothness of the image with better adaptability.

Keywords

• Doppler centroid estimation
• radial surface velocity
• sea ice drift measurement
• Sentinel-1A (S1A)