Orientation effects on polarimetric SAR images of sea ice

Remote sensing has a large relevance in sea ice observation. In this context, Synthetic Aperture Radar may play a valuable rule due to the possibility to achieve high resolution images not reliant on solar illumination and relatively independent of weather conditions. This paper deals with the exploitation of polarimetry to solve some ambiguities that may rise in SAR observations due to the orientation angle of the target. The quad-polarimetric datasets exploited in this work were acquired in 2007 by the DLR E-SAR systems in L-band over Svalbard. It is showed that taking into account orientation effects has potentials to improve the final ice classification.