Sea Ice Concentration from the RADARSAT Constellation Mission for Numerical Sea Ice Prediction

In this study, our technique for automated extraction of sea ice concentration from RADARSAT-2 data was adapted to the recently launched RADARSAT Constellation mission (RCM). Ice concentrations were derived from more than 2,600 RCM images acquired between August 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021. The retrieved ice concentrations were compared against the Canadian Ice Service (CIS) Image Analysis products. A very good agreement between RCM-derived and CIS Image Analysis ice concentrations was found with the root-mean square error of 2.2% and R
²
of 0.997. Our results suggest that automatically derived ice concentrations from RCM are well suited for further assimilation in sea ice numerical prediction systems such as Environment and Climate Change Canada Regional Ice-Ocean Prediction System.