A Comparison Between High-Resolution EO-Based and Ice Analyst-Assigned Sea Ice Concentrations

In the 4th Ice Analyst Workshop 2014, ice analysts made ice concentration (IC) analysis based on two synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images over the Gulf of Bothnia located in the northern Baltic sea. The ice analysts were divided into five work groups and each group assigned ICs to predefined polygons. This exercise gave us a good opportunity to compare the analysis performed by the work groups with the results produced by our dualpol-SAR IC estimation algorithm. The ice analyzes were performed and the algorithm was run in a resolution of 100 m. For reference, we also included the polygon median values produced by the ARTIST sea ice (ASI) radiometer-based algorithm producing the ICs in a 3.125-km grid. This kind of comparisons are very important to evaluate the automated algorithms with respect to the human interpretation. Human interpretation available in the ice charts is currently considered as the best available IC information.