PARAMETER ESTIMATION AND MOTION TRACKING OF PACK ICE FROM FY-3/MERSI IMAGES

Abstract

A method to estimate the shape parameters and track the motion velocity of pack ice is presented. The method consists of sea ice recognition, pack ice extraction, parameters estimation and motion tracking. We try to estimate the shape parameters and track the motion velocity from FY-3/MERSI images of Fram strait, which were covered by cloud less than 30%. It found that the pack ice concentration significantly decreases faster than sea ice concentration. The two parameters indicate the distribution difference between sea ices and pack ices. The change of the perimeter and mean clamp diameter are obvious owing to they were sensitive to the edge of the pack ices. But the small change of roundness, convexity and width-height ratio indicate the shape similarity of pack ices in various size. More than 80% of the pack ices in the study region are tracked successfully by the proposed method. The resulting motion vectors in the overlapping zones are found to match well with the polar daily grid sea ice motion vectors provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre. The method can provide the actual motion vector of pack ices to improve the distribution and details of the grid-to-grid motion vectors.