Seasonal and diurnal variations in SAR signatures of landfast sea ice

The seasonal and diurnal changes in total distributions of three fast ice sites, validated during the Seasonal Sea Ice Monitoring Site (SIMS ´90) experiment, are presented. Rationale for the observed changes are provided using previous scatterometer and SAR observations of the seasonally varying snow-covered sea ice surface. The implications of the stability and rapidity of the observed changes are considered important in the development of semiautomated feature extraction algorithms, required by the operational sea ice community, and in monitoring the seasonal evolution of a snow-covered sea ice surface