VALIDATION OF SEA ICE MOTION DERIVED FROM AMSR-E AND SSM/I DATA USING MODIS DATA

Since longer wavelength microwave radiation can penetrate clouds, satellite passive microwave sensors can observe sea ice of the entire polar region on a daily basis. Thus, it is becoming popular to derive sea ice motion vectors from a pair of satellite passive microwave sensor images observed at one or few day interval. Usually, the accuracies of derived vectors are validated by comparing with the position data of drifting buoys. However, the number of buoys for validation is always quite limited compared to a large number of vectors derived from satellite images. In this study, the sea ice motion vectors automatically derived from pairs of AMSR-E 89GHz images (IFOV = 3.5 ${\times}$ 5.9km) by an image-to-image cross correlation were validated by comparing with sea ice motion vectors manually derived from pairs of cloudless MODIS images (IFOV=250 ${\times}$ 250m). Since AMSR-E and MODIS are both on the same Aqua satellite of NASA, the observation time of both sensors are the same. The relative errors of AMSR-E vectors against MODIS vectors were calculated. The accuracy validation has been conducted for 5 scenes. If we accept relative error of less than 30% as correct vectors, 75% to 92% of AMSR-E vectors derived from one scene were correct. On the other hand, the percentage of correct sea ice vectors derived from a pair of SSM/I 85GHz images (IFOV = 15 ${\times}$ 13km) observed nearly simultaneously with one of the AMSR-E images was 46%. The difference of the accuracy between AMSR-E and SSM/I is reflecting the difference of IFOV. The accuracies of H and V polarization were different from scene to scene, which may reflect the difference of sea ice distributions and their snow cover of each scene.