The invention discloses a remote sensing estimation method for the thickness of sea ice. The remote sensing estimation method comprises the steps that a ground echo waveform is obtained from a CryoSat-2 radar altimeter, a raw echo waveform is fit through a composite cubic Bezier curve, the position of a waveform re-tracking point is solved, the freeboard height of the sea ice is calculated, and meanwhile, data such as the accumulated snow depth and the sea ice type in the same period are obtained; the data are subjected to geographical coordinate matching to obtain point data containing the freeboard height of the sea ice, the accumulated snow depth and the sea ice type; different sea ice densities are given to one-year ice and multiyear ice, by combining the accumulated snow density withthe seawater density, the thickness of the sea ice is estimated through a hydrostatic model, and finally a sea ice thickness distribution diagram in a study area is obtained through projection transformation, raster conversion and space resampling. According to the remote sensing estimation method, a novel waveform re-tracking method, namely a composite cubic Bezier curve fitting method, is adopted, the problem that an original method is sensitive to the surface characteristics of ground features is solved, and thus the estimation accuracy of the thickness of the sea ice is improved.