On retrieving sea ice freeboard from ICESat laser altimeter

Khvorostovsky, Kirill; Rampal, Pierre

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-2329-2016

Articles | Volume 10, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-2329-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-2329-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 5

Research article

|

10 Oct 2016

Research article |

| 10 Oct 2016

On retrieving sea ice freeboard from ICESat laser altimeter

Kirill Khvorostovsky and Pierre Rampal

Data sets

GLAS/ICESat L2 Sea Ice Altimetry Data H. J. Zwally, R. Schutz, C. Bentley, J. Bufton, T. Herring, J. Minster, J. Spinhirne, and T. Ross https://doi.org/10.5067/9IJ7MLCQJMXX

Arctic Sea Ice Freeboard and Thickness D. Yi and H. J. Zwally http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0393

QuikSCAT satellite scatterometer data Brigham Young University ftp://ftp.scp.byu.edu/data/qscat/SigBrw

AMSR-E/Aqua Daily L3 25 km Brightness Temperature & Sea Ice Concentration Polar Grids, Version 3 D. Cavalieri, J. Comiso, T. Markus https://nsidc.org/data/AE_SI25/versions/3

Short summary

We analyse two methods of freeboard retrieval from ICESat satellite data that were used to derive the two widely used Arctic sea ice thickness products. We show that although different factors result in significant local differences between freeboards, they roughly compensate each other with respect to overall freeboard estimation. Thus the difference found between the sea ice thickness datasets should be attributed to different parameters used in the freeboard-to-thickness conversion.