Blue-ice domain discrimination using interferometric coherence in Antarctic Grove Mountains

Discrimination of blue-ice domain is very important for meteorolite searching and Antarctic inland ice sheet evolvement research. Application of SAR interferometric coherence to blue-ice domain target discrimination is studied over polar inland ice. For the region of Grove Mountains in East Antarctica, interferometric coherence analysis is carried out for a pair of tandem ERS- 1/2 SLC full scenes acquired in February 1996. The investigation indicates significant differences in coherence between blue-ice and other ice sheet features, providing possibilities for target discrimination. The generated blue-ice domain map is compared to a reference blue-ice domain map extracted from TM image acquired in 1990. The final results indicates good consistency.