Application Capacity Evaluation of HJ-1-C towards Ice Disaster during On-orbit Test Period

Abstract

On November 19, 2012, HJ-1-C was launched successfully, which is the first civil Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite in China and is also the only S-band SAR on-orbit satellite in the world. During the on-orbit period, National Disaster Reduction Center of China (NDRCC) preliminarily evaluated the application capacity towards the ice disaster, and also evaluated the relative precision by using multispectral images of ZY-3 satellite. The result shows that, the S-band SAR satellite has super response towards ice. Entirely freeze-up area, non entirely freeze-up area and drift ice area can be effectively identified, and the S-band SAR satellite has better disaster reduction application capacity. The S-band SAR satellite data will fill up the band’s blank of SAR satellite in China and even the world, and its disaster reduction potentiality remains to be excavated further more.