The Northwest Passage (NWP) in the Arctic is usually covered with hazardous multi-year ice (MYI) and seasonal first-year ice (FYI) in winter, with possible thin ice and open-water areas during transition seasons. Ice classification is important for both marine navigation and climate change studies. Satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems have shown advantages of retrieving this information. Operational ice mapping relies on visual analysis of SAR images along with ancillary data. However, these maps estimate ice types and concentrations within large-size polygons of a few tens or hundreds of kilometers, which are subjectively identified and selected by analysts. This study aims at developing an automated algorithm to identify individual MYI floes from SAR images then classify the rest of the image as FYI and other ice types. The algorithm identifies the MYI floes using extended-maximum operator, morphological image processing, and a few geometrical features. Classifying the rest of the image uses texture and neural network model. The input data is a set of Sentinel-1 A/B Extended Wide (EW) mode images, acquired between September and March 2016–2019. Although the overall accuracy (for all type classification) from the new method scored 93.26%, the accuracy from using the texture classifier only was 75.81%. The kappa coefficient from the former was higher than the latter by 0.25. Compared with the operational ice charts from the Canadian Ice Service, ice type maps from the new method show better distribution of MYI at the fine scale of individual floes. Comparison against MYI concentration from two automated algorithms that use a combination of coarse-resolution passive and active microwave data also confirms the advantage of resolving MYI floes from the fine-resolution SAR.

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of Greenland provide the basic data for studying the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS), but little research quantitatively evaluates and compares the accuracy of various Greenland DEMs. This study uses IceBridge elevation data to evaluate the accuracies of the the Greenland Ice Map Project (GIMP)1 DEM, GIMP2 DEM, TanDEM-X, and ArcticDEM in their corresponding time ranges. This study also analyzes the impact of DEM accuracy and resolution on the accuracy of river network extraction. The results show that (1) within the time range covered by each DEM, TanDEM-X with an RMSE of 5.60 m has higher accuracy than the other DEMs in terms of absolute height accuracy, while GIMP1 has the lowest accuracy among the four Greenland DEMs, with an RMSE of 14.34 m. (2) Greenland DEMs are affected by regional errors and interannual changes. The accuracy in areas with elevations above 2000 m is higher than that in areas with elevations below 2000 m, and better accuracy is observed in the north than in the south. The stability of the ArcticDEM product is higher than those of the other three DEM products, and its RMSE standard deviation over multiple years is only 0.14 m. Therefore, the errors caused by the applications of DEMs with longer time spans are smaller. GIMP1 performs in an opposite manner, with a standard deviation of 2.39 m. (3) The river network extracted from TanDEM-X is close to the real river network digitized from remote sensing images, with an accuracy of 50.78%. The river network extracted from GIMP1 exhibits the largest errors, with an accuracy of only 8.83%. This study calculates and compares the accuracy of four Greenland DEMs and indicates that TanDEM-X has the highest accuracy, adding quantitative studies on the accuracy evaluation of various Greenland DEMs. This study also compares the results of different DEM river network extractions, verifies the impact of DEM accuracy on the accuracy of the river network extraction results, and provides an explorable direction for the hydrological analysis of Greenland as a whole.

Leads are almost linear fractures within the ice pack, which are commonly observed in polar regions. In wintertime, leads promote energy flux from the underlying ocean to the atmosphere. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can monitor leads at a finer spatial resolution than other spaceborne datasets, regardless of solar illumination and atmospheric conditions. However, the SAR-based lead detection methods proposed to date are restricted to some specific areas, instead of the entire Arctic. In this paper, we present a generalized deep learning-based approach for automatic sea ice lead detection (SILDET) in the Arctic wintertime using Sentinel-1 SAR images. The validation results show that SILDET has the capability of detecting open and frozen leads at different stages of development. Compared with visual interpretation of Sentinel-1 images, the overall detection accuracy is 97.80% and the Kappa coefficient is 0.88. The lead map of a regional study obtained from SILDET was compared to that from a previous SAR-based lead detection method and a lead dataset based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. The lead map was also validated using Sentinel-2 images. The result shows that SILDET can provide a more detailed distribution of leads and better estimation of lead width and area. SILDET was applied to present the Arctic-wide lead distribution from January to April 2023 with a spatial resolution of 40 m. The Arctic-wide lead width distribution follows a power law with an average exponent of 1.65. The SILDET approach can be expected to provide long-term high-resolution lead distribution records.