This dissertation presents new research into the study of simulation and measurement
techniques for microwave remote sensing of sea ice. We have embarked on a major
study of the microwave propagation and scattering properties of sea ice in an attempt
to link the physics of the sea ice medium to experimentally obtained concomitant
scatterometer measurements.
During our fieldwork, we studied the polarimetric backscattering response of sea
ice, focusing on newly-formed sea ice under a large assortment of surface coverage.
Polarimetric backscattering results and physical data for 40 stations during the fall
freeze-up of 2003, 2006, and 2007 are presented. Analysis of the co-polarization
correlation coefficient showed its sensitivity to sea ice thickness and surface coverage
and resulted in a statistically significant separation of ice thickness into two regimes:
ice less than 6 cm thick and ice greater than 8 cm thick. A case study quantified the
backscatter of snow-infiltrated frost fl
owers on new sea ice, showing that the presence
of the frost
flowers enhanced the backscatter by more than 6 dB.
In our simulation work, an efficient method for simulating scattering from objects
in multi-layered media was incorporated into a scattered-field formulation of the FVTD
method. A total-field 1D-FDTD solution to the plane-wave propagation through
multi-layered meda was used as a source. The method was validated for a TE-polarized
incident-field through comparisons with other numerical techniques involving examples
of scattering from canonically-shaped objects.
Methods for homogenization of inhomogeneous media were developed and validated
using well-known dielectric mixture models. A Monte Carlo Method for simulating
scattering from statistically rough surfaces was developed and was validated through
favorable comparison with the SPM method for rough surface scattering.
Finally, we presented a new Monte Carlo Method for simulating sea ice remote
sensing that utilized the framework of the FVTD method for scattering simulations.
The modeling process was driven by actual physical measurements of sea ice, wherein
dielectric and physics-based modeling techniques were employed. The method was
demonstrated through a series of case studies where the scattering from newly-formed
sea ice was simulated using a TE-polarized incident- eld. Good agreement between
experimental scatterometer measurements and simulated results was obtained for
co-polarized returns, whereas cross-polarized results indicated that more depolarizing
features must be taken into account.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/4812 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Isleifson, Dustin |
| Contributors | Shafai, Lotfollah (Electrical and Computer Engineering) Barber, David (Clayton H Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources), LoVetri, Joe (Electrical and Computer Engineering) Papakyriakou, Tim (Clayton H Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources) Bernier, Monique (Institut national de la recherche scientifique INRS) |
| Publisher | IEEE, IEEE, IEEE |
| Source Sets | University of Manitoba Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
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