Assimilation of sea ice thickness derived from CryoSat-2  along-track freeboard measurements into the Met Office's  Forecast Ocean Assimilation Model (FOAM)

Fiedler, Emma K.; Martin, Matthew J.; Blockley, Ed; Mignac, Davi; Fournier, Nicolas; Ridout, Andy; Shepherd, Andrew; Tilling, Rachel

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-61-2022

Articles | Volume 16, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-61-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-61-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 1

Research article

|

06 Jan 2022

Research article |

| 06 Jan 2022

Assimilation of sea ice thickness derived from CryoSat-2 along-track freeboard measurements into the Met Office's Forecast Ocean Assimilation Model (FOAM)

Emma K. Fiedler, Matthew J. Martin, Ed Blockley, Davi Mignac, Nicolas Fournier, Andy Ridout, Andrew Shepherd, and Rachel Tilling

Data sets

Unified Sea Ice Thickness Climate Data Record A. J. Schweiger http://psc.apl.uw.edu/sea_ice_cdr

IceBridge Sea Ice Freeboard, Snow Depth, and Thickness, 2015-2017 N. Kurtz, M. Studinger, J. Harbeck, V.-D.-P. Onana, and S. Farrell http://nsidc.org/data/idcsi2.html

Short summary

Sea ice thickness (SIT) observations derived from CryoSat-2 satellite measurements have been successfully used to initialise an ocean and sea ice forecasting model (FOAM). Other centres have previously used gridded and averaged SIT observations for this purpose, but we demonstrate here for the first time that SIT measurements along the satellite orbit track can be used. Validation of the resulting modelled SIT demonstrates improvements in the model performance compared to a control.