Toward the Discrimination of Oil Spills in Newly Formed Sea Ice Using C-Band Radar Polarimetric Parameters

Abstract

Climate-driven sea ice loss has exposed the Arctic to increased human activity, which comes along with a higher risk of oil spills. As a result, we investigated the ability of C-band polarimetric parameters in a controlled mesocosm to accurately identify and discriminate between oil-contaminated and uncontaminated newly formed sea ice (NI). Parameters, such as total power, copolarization ratio, copolarization correlation coefficient, and others, were derived from the normalized radar cross section and covariance matrix to characterize the temporal evolution of NI before and after oil spill events. For separation purposes, entropy ( $H$ ) and mean-alpha ( $\alpha$ ) were extracted from eigen decomposition of the coherency matrix. The $H$ versus $\alpha $ scatterplot revealed that a threshold classifier of 0.3- $H$ and 18°- $\alpha $ could distinguish oil-contaminated NI from its oil-free surroundings. From the temporal evolution of the polarimetric parameters, the results demonstrate that the copolarization correlation coefficient is the most reliable polarimetric parameter for oil spill detection, as it provides information on a variety of oil spill scenarios, including oil encapsulated within ice and oil spreading on top of ice. Overall, these findings will be used to support existing and future C-band polarimetric radar satellites for resolving ambiguities associated with Arctic oil spill events, particularly during freeze-up seasons.