Winter Arctic sea ice thickness from ICESat-2: upgrades to freeboard and snow loading estimates and an assessment of the first three winters of data collection

Petty, Alek A.; Keeney, Nicole; Cabaj, Alex; Kushner, Paul; Bagnardi, Marco

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-127-2023

Articles | Volume 17, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-127-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-127-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 1

Research article

|

13 Jan 2023

Research article |

| 13 Jan 2023

Winter Arctic sea ice thickness from ICESat-2: upgrades to freeboard and snow loading estimates and an assessment of the first three winters of data collection

Alek A. Petty, Nicole Keeney, Alex Cabaj, Paul Kushner, and Marco Bagnardi

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-127-2023-supplement

Data sets

ICESat-2 L4 Monthly Gridded Sea Ice Thickness, Version 2 A. A. Petty, N. Kurtz, R. Kwok, T. Markus, T. A. Neumann, and N. Keeney https://doi.org/10.5067/OE8BDP5KU30Q

ICESat-2 L4 Along-Track Sea Ice Thickness, Version 1 A. A. Petty, N. Kurtz, R. Kwok, T. Markus, and T. A. Neumann https://doi.org/10.5067/JTI5YG3S6VAJ

NASA Eulerian Snow On Sea Ice Model Version 1.1 (NESOSIMv1.1) data: 1980--2021 (September to April) (v1.1) Alek Petty and Alex Cabaj https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5164314

ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Sea Ice Freeboard R. Kwok, A. A. Petty, G. Cunningham, T. Markus, D. Hancock, A. Ivanoff, J. Wimert, M. Bagnardi, N. Kurtz, and the ICESat-2 Science Team https://doi.org/10.5067/ATLAS/ATL10.005

ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Sea Ice Freeboard R. Kwok, A. A. Petty, G. Cunningham, T. Markus, D. Hancock, A. Ivanoff, J. Wimert, M. Bagnardi, N. Kurtz, and the ICESat-2 Science Team https://doi.org/10.5067/ATLAS/ATL10.004

NOAA/NSIDC Climate Data Record of Passive Microwave Sea Ice Concentration W. N. Meier, F. Fetterer, A. K. Windnagel, and J. S. Stewart https://doi.org/10.7265/efmz-2t65

ERA5 monthly averaged data on single levels from 1959 to present H. Hersbach, B. Bell, P. Berrisford, G. Biavati, A. Horányi, J. Muñoz Sabater, J. Nicolas, C. Peubey, R. Radu, I. Rozum, D. Schepers, A. Simmons, C. Soci, D. Dee, and J.-N. Thépaut https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.f17050d7

Use of C-Band Scatterometer for Sea Ice Edge Identification (ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice/type/) Lars-Anders Breivik, Steinar Eastwood, and Thomas Lavergne https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2012.2188898

Polar Pathfinder Daily 25 km EASE-Grid Sea Ice Motion Vectors M. Tschudi, W. N. Meier, J. S. Stewart, C. Fowler, and J. Maslanik https://doi.org/10.5067/INAWUWO7QH7B

CryoSat-2 Level 4 Sea Ice Elevation, Freeboard, and Thickness N. Kurtz and J. Harbeck https://doi.org/10.5067/96JO0KIFDAS8

CryoSat-2 estimates of Arctic sea ice thickness and volume (http://www.cpom.ucl.ac.uk/csopr/seaice.html) Seymour W. Laxon, Katharine A. Giles, Andy L. Ridout, Duncan J. Wingham, Rosemary Willatt, Robert Cullen, Ron Kwok, Axel Schweiger, Jinlun Zhang, Christian Haas, Stefan Hendricks, Richard Krishfield, Nathan Kurtz, Sinead Farrell, and Malcolm Davidson https://doi.org/10.1002/grl.50193

A weekly Arctic sea-ice thickness data record from merged CryoSat-2 and SMOS satellite data (https://spaces.awi.de/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=291898639) Robert Ricker, Stefan Hendricks, Lars Kaleschke, Xiangshan Tian-Kunze, Jennifer King, and Christian Haas https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1607-2017

Deterioration of perennial sea ice in the Beaufort Gyre from 2003 to 2012 and its impact on the oceanic freshwater cycle (https://www2.whoi.edu/site/beaufortgyre/data/mooring-data/2018-2021-mooring-data-from-the-bgep-project/) R. A. Krishfield, A. Proshutinsky, K. Tateyama, W. J. Williams, E. C. Carmack, F. A. McLaughlin, and M.-L. Timmermans https://doi.org/10.1002/2013JC008999

Global Low Resolution Sea Ice Drift - Multimission OSI SAF https://doi.org/10.15770/EUM_SAF_OSI_NRT_2007

Year-round Arctic sea ice thickness from CryoSat-2 Baseline-D Level 1b observations 2010-2020 British Antarctic Survey https://doi.org/10.5285/D8C66670-57AD-44FC-8FEF-942A46734ECB

User guide - AWI CryoSat-2 sea ice thickness data product (v1.2) (https://data.seaiceportal.de/data/cryosat2/) S. Hendricks and R. Ricker http://epic.awi.de/41242/

Model code and software

akpetty/NESOSIM: Version 1.1 (v1.1) Alek Petty and Alex Cabaj https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4448356

akpetty/icesat2-book: v1.0 Alek Petty and Nicole Keeney https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7474217

akpetty/ICESat-2-sea-ice-thickness: Version 1 (v1.0.2) Alek Petty https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7474255

Short summary

We present upgrades to winter Arctic sea ice thickness estimates from NASA's ICESat-2. Our new thickness results show better agreement with independent data from ESA's CryoSat-2 compared to our first data release, as well as new, very strong comparisons with data collected by moorings in the Beaufort Sea. We analyse three winters of thickness data across the Arctic, including 50 cm thinning of the multiyear ice over this 3-year period.