The main purpose of this study is to introduce a novel SAR data-based methodology framework for
automated monitoring of the variation of ice cover characteristics and mapping ice types that can be
applied to many river systems in high northern latitude regions. This paper first investigates the
performance of radar backscatter based CV analysis to provide insight into the spatio-temporal variation
of river ice covers during the course of winter. The unsupervised fuzzy k-means method and classification
scheme were then developed to characterize of different ice types formed during the freeze-up period of
the 2013–2014 and 2014–2015 winters along the Slave River Delta channel. The characteristics of river
ice freeze-up, derived from our automatic algorithms, were compared with visual image analysis,
meteorological conditions, field observations and time-lapse camera photos.