Temporal Mixture Analysis of Arctic Sea Ice Imagery: A New Approach for Monitoring Environmental Change

In this paper, we introduce the idea of temporal mixture analysis (TMA) for analyzing long sequences of hypertemporal remote sensing imagery. The basis of this approach is spectral mixture analysis, which we adapt from the spectral domain to the time domain. The TMA procedure is demonstrated by applying it to a 9-year record of scanning multichannel microwave radiometer sea ice concentrations in the Northern Hemisphere. We find that end-member fraction images provide a unique summary of spatial arrangements and temporal characteristics of the mapped phenomenon during a specific period and can be used to characterize climatic normals. A key distinction that differentiates temporal mixture imagery from similar images derived through more traditional means is that the data presented are derived from the temporal characteristics of the analyzed phenomenon and not the type of feature present.