Automatic Calculation of Ice Drift Based on AMSR Data

The results of applying a new method for the automatic calculation of ice drift based on the sequence of Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) images are considered. The method is analogous to the cross-correlation method but uses other ways to track template similarity and a new vector rejection criterion. Ice-concentration maps constructed using the ARTIST Sea Ice (ASI) algorithm (University of Bremen) based on data from 89 GHz spectral channels are used as images. While highly accurate at calculating ice drift, the new method has made it possible to reduce the template size, which makes it possible to obtain more detailed drift maps. Even in the case of a template linear size of 50-70 km, the ice-drift calculation accuracy is within 5 cm/s and method informativeness (the proportion of constructed vectors and vectors after rejection) is 60-70%. The method shows higher efficiency if the brightness mismatch is used as a measure of similarity between two templates instead of the correlation coefficient.