Discontinuous Non-Rigid Motion Analysis of Sea Ice using C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar Satellite Imagery

Sea-ice motion consists of complex non-rigid motions involving continuous, piece-wise continuous and discrete particle motion. Techniques for estimating non-rigid motion of sea ice from pairs of satellite images (generally spaced three days apart) are still in the developmental stages. For interior Arctic and Antarctic pack ice, the continuum assumption begins to fail below the 5 km scale with evidence of discontinuities already revealed in models and remote sensing products in the form of abrupt changes in magnitude and direction of the differential velocity. Using a hierarchical multi-scale phase-correlation method and profiting from known limitations of cross correlation methods, we incorporate the identification of discontinuities into our motion estimation algorithm, thereby descending below the continuum threshold to examine the phenomenon of discontinuous non-rigid sea-ice motion.