Seasonal evolution of the sea ice floe size distribution in the Beaufort Sea from 2 decades of MODIS data

Buckley, Ellen M.; Cañuelas, Leela; Timmermans, Mary-Louise; Wilhelmus, Monica M.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-5031-2024

Articles | Volume 18, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-5031-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-5031-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 11

Research article

|

06 Nov 2024

Research article |

| 06 Nov 2024

Seasonal evolution of the sea ice floe size distribution in the Beaufort Sea from 2 decades of MODIS data

Ellen M. Buckley, Leela Cañuelas, Mary-Louise Timmermans, and Monica M. Wilhelmus

Data sets

Ice Floe Segmentation of MODIS imagery E. Buckley and M. Wilhelmus https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11553700

Model code and software

ellenbuckley/FSD_segmentation: FSD paper code (v1.0.1) Ellen Buckley https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14010776

Short summary

Arctic sea ice cover evolves seasonally from large plates separated by long, linear leads in the winter to a mosaic of smaller sea ice floes in the summer. Here, we present a new image segmentation algorithm applied to thousands of images and identify over 9 million individual pieces of ice. We observe the characteristics of the floes and how they evolve throughout the summer as the ice breaks up.