Long-Term Sea Ice Drift Datasets from Satellites
Abstract
Polar orbiting satellites enable daily and global coverage of the polar oceans, providing an unique monitoring capability of sea ice dynamics over Arctic and Antarctic. Backscatter maps from SeaWinds sensor onboard QuikSCAT satellite and brightness temperature maps from SSM/I are available at a pixel resolution of 12.5 kilometers from which ice drift can be estimated for each sensor during the cold period. IFREMER/CERSAT makes available a “Merged” sea ice drift dataset based on the combination of these drifts at 3, 6 and 30-day lags at the grid resolution of 62.5 kilometers. Combining these drifts increases the number of valid vectors and the time window. From 1992 until 1999, drifts are estimated from SSM/I radiometer. From 1999 until 2009, drifts are estimated from the combination of QuikSCAT scatterometer and SSM/I radiometer, since 2007, drifts are also estimated from the combination of ASCAT/MetOp data and SSM/I radiometer data. In order to ease the use of these datasets by modelers, interpolated fields filling the remaining gaps of the Merged drift fields were built. This unique 18 year time series will continue for Arctic long term monitoring, it is a part of the GMES sea ice datasets, routinely produced for ocean models for validation or assimilation; the assimilation of these drift data has been tested with very good results.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AGUFM.C53A..02G
- Keywords:
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- 0750 CRYOSPHERE / Sea ice;
- 0758 CRYOSPHERE / Remote sensing;
- 4262 OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL / Ocean observing systems;
- 6969 RADIO SCIENCE / Remote sensing