The DALO-ARCTIC campaign: Multi-spectral SAR Imaging of Ice Features in Greenland

Abstract

In May 2015, the Danish Defence Acquisition and Logistics Organization (DALO) together with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) conducted the joint DALO-ARCTIC airborne SAR campaign with the F-SAR sensor over several test- sites in Greenland. Principal goal of this campaign was to demonstrate the capabilities of SAR for security applications in arctic environments, as well as to investigate various advanced methods for extracting ice and snow parameters from SAR data. During this campaign, the ability of F-SAR to simultaneously record fully-polarimetric SAR data in several frequency bands was used for the first time on a large scale. Due to the significantly varying penetration depth of the different bands into ice and snow, it is of particular interest to understand and analyse what can be seen in each band and what are the dominating scattering processes. This paper will discuss this based on examples of polarimetric multi-band imaging of ice and snow layers from data acquired during the DALO-ARCTIC campaign. In this way, the huge potential of multi-spectral SAR imaging for the analysis of ice bodies will be demonstrated.