Retrieval of River Ice Thickness From C-Band PolSAR Data

River ice has an important effect on natural processes and human activities in northern countries. Current models for estimating river ice thickness are mostly based on environmental data. They require several inputs and yield only a global estimate of ice thickness for a large heterogeneous area. Attempts have been made intending to retrieve river ice thickness from remote sensing using monopolarized C-band radar data. No reliable maps of ice thickness have been produced. In this paper, the potential of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data for estimating river ice thickness is demonstrated, and a river ice thickness retrieval model is proposed. The C-band SAR images used in this paper were acquired by Radarsat-2 in the winter of 2009 over the Saint-François River (Southern Quebec), the Koksoak River (Northern Quebec), and the Mackenzie River (Northwest Territories) in Canada. Field campaigns were carried out to obtain ice thickness validation data at 70 locations. Polarimetric entropy was used to obtain ice thickness estimates. This approach results in spatially distributed ice thickness maps for selected ice types.