Arctic Sea Ice Type Classification Using a Multi-Dimensional Feature Set Derived from FY-3E GNSS-R and SMOS

Sea ice classification is of fundamental importance for polar monitoring and global climate research. Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) has emerged as a frontier technology in polar remote sensing due to its high spatiotemporal resolution and cost-effectiveness. Based on BeiDou System Reflectometry (BDS-R) data acquired from the Fengyun-3E (FY-3E) satellite, this study introduces a classification approach that integrates multi-dimensional sea ice information. A comprehensive feature set was constructed by integrating the Spectral Entropy (SE) of the Normalized Integrated Delay Waveform (NIDW) First-order Differential Curve to characterize the oscillatory complexity of the trailing edge power decay process as a scattering dynamic property, the Root Mean Square height (RMS) to characterize the attenuation magnitude of scattering intensity arising from surface roughness and related factors as a scattering intensity attenuation property, and salinity (S) and L-band brightness temperature (TB) data from SMOS to describe dielectric and radiative properties. These novel features are combined with traditional GNSS-R features. After selecting the optimal feature set via an ablation study, the features were used to train a Random Forest (RF) classifier for sea ice classification. Validated against Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) sea ice type products, the proposed method yielded an overall accuracy of 93.86% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.8061. The integration of multi-dimensional features notably improved the identification of Multi-Year Ice (MYI), achieving a Recall of 85.11% and an F1-score of 84.43%. These results indicate that the proposed multi-dimensional feature set provides an effective solution for GNSS-R-based sea ice classification.