Synthetic aperture radar and passive microwave data analysis fusion

Abstract

Data analysis only based on a specific sensor has always some limitations related to sensor properties and imaging geometry. Data analysis fusion is a novel method which was used in this study to diminish disadvantages of making analysis only an information source. In this work, zero dimensional variational (0D-Var) data assimilation method were used first time to combine analysis results of passive microwave and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to make automated and reliable sea ice analysis. Simple geophysical models were developed to map sea ice features in to SAR features space. The manual image analysis charts were employed for validation.