Using Semicircular Sampling to Increase Sea Water/Ice Discrimination Altitude

The rapid development of aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) increases their use, including in polar areas, which are characterized by their remoteness and rather harsh conditions. The dominant trends in airborne radar development are expanding their functionality and increasing the altitude of their applicability. Our study focuses on the functionality enhancement of airborne high-altitude conical scanning radars currently used for circular clouds and precipitation observations as well as for sea wind measurements. Recently, we showed how a semicircular observation scheme, instead of a circular one, can double the maximum applicable altitude of sea wind measurements made with such radars. Here we apply this approach to show how an airborne high-altitude conical scanning radar’s functionality can also be expanded for sea water/ice discrimination within a semicircular observation scheme, again doubling the maximum discrimination altitude compared to circular observations. The discrimination is performed in scatterometer mode using the minimum statistical distance of the measured normalized radar cross sections (NRCSs) to the geophysical model functions (GMFs) of the sea water and ice underlying surfaces. However, as no sea ice GMF is available for the considered horizontal transmit and receive polarization at the Ku band, we instead used a substitute sea ice GMF having the same azimuth isotropic property setting for its NRCSs as the averaged value of the measured azimuth NRCSs within the semicircular observations scheme. Our analysis found that incidence angles of 30°, 45°, and 60° are well suited to our sea water/ice discrimination method, and that incidence angles higher than 30° are preferable as they provide a higher difference in the statistical distance of the measured NRCSs to the sea ice and water GMFs, whereas an incidence angle of 30° provides the highest applicable altitude for sea water/ice discrimination and wind retrieval. We also demonstrated the ability of the sea water/ice discrimination procedure’s implementation for any airborne wind scatterometer or multimode radar operated in scatterometer mode over freezing seas to avoid entirely erroneous sea wind measurement results when a sea ice surface is observed. The obtained results can also be used for enhancing aircraft and UAV radars and for developing new remote sensing systems. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2024-08-02-07 Full Text: PDF