Thinning sea ice has significant impacts on the energy exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean. In this study we present visual and quantitative comparisons of thin-ice detections obtained from classified Cryosat-2 radar reflections and thin-ice-thickness estimates derived from MODIS thermal-infrared imagery. In addition to good comparability, the results of the study indicate the potential for a deeper understanding of sea ice in the polar seas and improved processing of altimeter data.

In this study, a new gridded altimetry-based regional sea level dataset for the North Sea is presented, named North SEAL. It is based on long-term multi-mission cross-calibrated altimetry data consistently preprocessed with coastal dedicated algorithms. On a 6–8 km wide triangular mesh, North SEAL provides time series of monthly sea level anomalies as well as sea level trends and amplitudes of the mean annual sea level cycle for the period 1995–2019 for various applications.