New Estimates of Winter Arctic Sea Ice Growth from NASA's ICESat-2
Abstract
NASA's ICESat-2 satellite mission has provided improved insights into the distribution of sea ice freeboard and thickness across the Arctic Ocean, a topic of particular interest due to the importance of sea ice in the global climate system. In this project, we explore variability of sea ice thickness and growth across the Arctic over the past two winter seasons (2018/2019 and 2019/2020) using monthly gridded sea ice data from ICESat-2, and the potential drivers of seasonal growth using ERA5 atmospheric data, OSI SAF ice type, NSIDC drift vectors, and other relevant datasets. Providing new assessments of winter sea ice thickness and growth allows for a better understanding of the drivers of seasonal ice growth and how they might vary across the Arctic. We present the overall seasonal change in ice thickness in the inner Arctic Basin, and compare multi-year, first-year, and total ice growth between the two winter seasons. We also analyze regional ice thickness and growth which showed stronger seasonal differences, especially in the Beaufort Sea, which we link to differences in ice type and drift.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMC014.0012K
- Keywords:
-
- 0750 Sea ice;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0758 Remote sensing;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 1621 Cryospheric change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 4207 Arctic and Antarctic oceanography;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL