Assessing surface radiative fluxes and developing surface turbulent heat fluxes over Arctic sea ice

In this study, we have developed a new satellite-based surface heat and moisture flux data set over the ice-covered ocean in the Arctic using a recently developed flux algorithm based on the theory of maximum entropy production (MEP model). First, the accuracy and uncertainty associated with surface radiative fluxes and temperature for three available satellite products are evaluated against the assembled in-situ data. The three satellite products are the Surface Radiation Budget project (SRB), the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP), and the Extended AVHRR Polar Pathfinder version-2 (APP-x). Our comparisons suggest that 1) in terms of the overall bias, root mean square error, and correlation, the net surface radiative flux of ISCCP is closer to in-situ observations than that of SRB and APP-x; 2) in terms of the bias by local times, it is not very clear which satellite product is superior to others; and 3) in terms of interannual variability of the bias, the net surface radiative flux of ISCCP is more accurate than that of SRB and APP-x. Based on the above comparison, we use the ISCCP surface radiative fluxes as input values for the MEP model to calculate surface turbulent heat fluxes over Arctic sea ice.