Monitoring Freezing and Thawing of Shallow Lakes in Northern Alaska Using Sentinel-1 Data

The goal of this research was to evaluate the effect of Arctic climate change on the surrounding land area. In this research, we developed a method to monitor the freezing and thawing of shallow lakes in the Arctic region using C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and provide a strategy to evaluate the effect of climate change on the Arctic land area. A method to monitor the ice condition of these lakes was investigated using the SAR data acquired by Sentinel-1 from 2014 to 2017. We confirmed that the C-band SAR data from Sentinel-1 could monitor the freezing and thawing ice condition of shallow lakes in northern Alaska. The backscattering threshold between floating and grounded ice was −14 dB, which was approximately 2 dB less than that of ers-1/2. We envision continuing to monitor lake ice over a long period of time using future available Sentinel-1 data.