Automatic synthetic aperture radar information extraction algorithms for sea ice applications

Ice Centre Environment Canada (ICEC) is the Canadian Government Agency responsible for providing ice information over Canada´s offshore areas to marine operators. A mix of satellite, airborne and surface observations are used. The launch of RadarSAT in early 1995 will provide a major data source to this program. In order to exploit this new data source to its full potential, operational algorithms are being developed to extract sea ice information from the SAR data. This paper will describe an Ice Tracking System which calculates ice displacements from coincident image pairs. Additionally, progress will be reported towards the development of an operational sea ice classification to be available by the time of RadarSAT launch