For sea ice in the Baltic Sea, surface scattering can be regarded as the do
minant scattering mechanism at C-band. In this paper, a new statistical met
hod is introduced for making statistical inferences about the underlying ic
e surface roughness on the basis of one-dimensional (I-D) scatterometer dat
a y. The central parameter in the hierarchical model applied in the context
is a mixture parameter p, which indicates the degree of surface roughness
in ice surface. Several questions related to the occurrence of different ic
e classes on a transect can be solved with the aid of the posterior distrib
ution [p/y]. An empirical approximation for the posterior distribution is c
omputed by using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methodology. The efficiency of th
e suggested approach is investigated by analyzing a C-band HH-polarization
helicopter-borne HUTSCAT scatterometer data. The results provided by the st
atistical model show good agreement with a video-based ice type classificat
ion.