Correlation function study for sea ice

For active and passive microwave remote sensing of sea ice, a correlation function of exponential form is extracted from the photograph of a horizontal thin section taken from a sample of artificially grown saline ice that closely resembled Arctic congelation sea ice. It is found that the extracted correlation lengths are consistent with the published average size of brine pockets. With the application of strong fluctuation theory and the bilocal approximation, the effective permittivity tensor is derived in the low-frequency limit for an unbounded uniaxial random medium with two-phase mixtures. Using the extracted correlation lengths, the effective permittivity tensor is computed as a function of fractional volume of brine inclusions and compared with in situ measurements at 4.8 and 9.5 GHz.