Find in Library

<p>Sea ice leads play an important role in the heat exchange between the ocean and the overlying atmosphere, particularly narrow leads with widths of less than 100 <span class="inline-formula">m</span>. We present a method for detecting sea ice leads in the Arctic using high-resolution infrared images from the Thermal Infrared Spectrometer (TIS) on board the Sustainable Development Science Satellite 1 (SDGSAT-1), with a resolution of 30 <span class="inline-formula">m</span> in a swath of 300 <span class="inline-formula">km</span>. With the spatial resolution of leads observed by infrared remote sensing increasing to tens of meters, focused on the Beaufort Sea cases in April 2022, the TIS-detected leads achieve good agreement with Sentinel-2 visible images. For the three infrared bands of the TIS, the B2 (10.3–11.3 <span class="inline-formula">µm</span>) and B3 (11.5–12.5 <span class="inline-formula">µm</span>) bands show similar performance in detecting leads. The B1 band (8.0–10.5 <span class="inline-formula">µm</span>) can be usefully complementary to the other two bands, as a result of different temperature measurement sensitivity. Combining the detected results from the three TIS bands, the TIS is able to detect more leads with widths less than hundreds of meters compared to the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). Our results demonstrate that SDGSAT-1 TIS data at 30 <span class="inline-formula">m</span> resolution can effectively observe previously unresolvable sea ice leads, providing new insight into the contribution of narrow leads to rapid sea ice changes in the Arctic.</p>