ALEK PETTY
  1. Home
  2. Papers
  3. Winter Arctic Sea Ice Thickness From ICESat-2 Freeboards

Winter Arctic Sea Ice Thickness From ICESat-2 Freeboards

by Alek Petty, Nathan Kurtz, Ron Kwok, Thorsten Markus, Tom Neumann (2020)

Info

Citation

Petty, A. A., N. T. Kurtz, R. Kwok, T. Markus, T. A. Neumann (2020), Winter Arctic sea ice thickness from ICESat‐2 freeboards, Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans, 125, e2019JC015764. doi:10.1029/2019JC015764

Abstract

National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite‐2 (ICESat‐2) mission was launched in September 2018 with the primary goal of monitoring our rapidly changing polar regions. The sole instrument onboard, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, is now providing routine, very high‐resolution, surface elevation data across the globe, including the Arctic and Southern oceans. In this study, we demonstrate our new processing chain for converting the along‐track ICESat‐2 sea ice freeboard product (ATL10) into sea ice thickness, focusing our initial efforts on the Arctic Ocean. For this conversion, we primarily make use of snow depth and density data from the NASA Eulerian Snow on Sea Ice Model. The coarse resolution (100 km) snow data are redistributed onto the high‐resolution (approximately 30–100 m) ATL10 freeboards using relationships obtained from snow depth and freeboard data collected by NASA's Operation IceBridge mission. We present regional sea ice thickness distributions and highlight their seasonal evolution through our first winter season of data collection. We include ice thickness uncertainty estimates, while also acknowledging the limitations of these estimates. We generate a gridded monthly thickness product and compare this with various monthly sea ice thickness estimates obtained from European Space Agency's CryoSat‐2 satellite mission, with ICESat‐2 showing consistently lower thicknesses. Finally, we compare our February/March 2019 thickness estimates to ICESat February/March (19 February to 21 March) 2008 ice thickness estimates using the same input assumptions, which show a 0.37 m or 20% thinning across an inner Arctic Ocean domain in this 11‐year time period.

Altimetric Score (media attention)

Bibtex

@article{doi:10.1029/2019JC015764,
author = {Petty, Alek A. and Kurtz, Nathan T. and Kwok, Ron and Markus, Thorsten and Neumann, Thomas A.},
title = {Winter Arctic Sea Ice Thickness From ICESat-2 Freeboards},
journal = {Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans},
volume = {125},
number = {5},
pages = {e2019JC015764},
keywords = {Sea ice, Arctic, ICESat-2, altimetry},
doi = {10.1029/2019JC015764},
url = {https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019JC015764},
eprint = {https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2019JC015764},
note = {e2019JC015764 2019JC015764},
abstract = {Abstract National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission was launched in September 2018 with the primary goal of monitoring our rapidly changing polar regions. The sole instrument onboard, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, is now providing routine, very high-resolution, surface elevation data across the globe, including the Arctic and Southern oceans. In this study, we demonstrate our new processing chain for converting the along-track ICESat-2 sea ice freeboard product (ATL10) into sea ice thickness, focusing our initial efforts on the Arctic Ocean. For this conversion, we primarily make use of snow depth and density data from the NASA Eulerian Snow on Sea Ice Model. The coarse resolution (~100 km) snow data are redistributed onto the high-resolution (approximately 30–100 m) ATL10 freeboards using relationships obtained from snow depth and freeboard data collected by NASA's Operation IceBridge mission. We present regional sea ice thickness distributions and highlight their seasonal evolution through our first winter season of data collection. We include ice thickness uncertainty estimates, while also acknowledging the limitations of these estimates. We generate a gridded monthly thickness product and compare this with various monthly sea ice thickness estimates obtained from European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 satellite mission, with ICESat-2 showing consistently lower thicknesses. Finally, we compare our February/March 2019 thickness estimates to ICESat February/March (19 February to 21 March) 2008 ice thickness estimates using the same input assumptions, which show an ~0.37 m or ~20\% thinning across an inner Arctic Ocean domain in this 11-year time period.},
year = {2020}
}