Sea ice thickness retrieval from SAR imagery over Bohai sea

The Bohai sea is a semi-enclosed sea located in the northeast of China. Safety of ship navigation and exploration platforms are important issues. Reliable near real time ice information is necessary and the ice thickness distribution is still a challenge. Here we present an ice thickness estimation method combining numerical sea ice model and SAR data. A high resolution thermodynamic snow and ice model (HIGHTSI) is applied to calculate the thermodynamic ice growth and used as the ice thickness background. SAR images are used to express the local ice statistics and to redistribute the modeled ice thickness. The results are evaluated by comparing with in-situ observations from oil platforms and ice forecast results from National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center (NMEFC).