Tilling, RL, Ridout, A and Shepherd, A orcid.org/0000-0002-4914-1299
(2018)
Estimating Arctic sea ice thickness and volume using CryoSat-2 radar altimeter data.
Advances in Space Research, 62 (6).
pp. 1203-1225.
ISSN 0273-1177
Abstract
Arctic sea ice is a major element of the Earth’s climate system. It acts to regulate regional heat and freshwater budgets and subsequent atmospheric and oceanic circulation across the Arctic and at lower latitudes. Satellites have observed a decline in Arctic sea ice extent for all months since 1979. However, to fully understand how changes in the Arctic sea ice cover impact on our global weather and climate, long-term and accurate observations of its thickness distribution are also required. Such observations were made possible with the launch of the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) CryoSat-2 satellite in April 2010, which provides unparalleled coverage of the Arctic Ocean up to 88°N. Here we provide an end-to-end, comprehensive description of the data processing steps employed to estimate Northern Hemisphere sea ice thickness and subsequent volume using CryoSat-2 radar altimeter data and complementary observations. This is a sea ice processor that has been under constant development at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) since the early 1990s. We show that there is no significant bias in our satellite sea ice thickness retrievals when compared with independent measurements. We also provide a detailed analysis of the uncertainties associated with our sea ice thickness and volume estimates by considering the independent sources of error in the retrieval. Each month, the main contributors to the uncertainty are snow depth and snow density, which suggests that a crucial next step in Arctic sea ice research is to develop improved estimates of snow loading. In this paper we apply our theory and methods solely to CryoSat-2 data in the Northern Hemisphere. However, they may act as a guide to developing a sea ice processing system for satellite radar altimeter data over the Southern Hemisphere, and from other Polar orbiting missions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/cy. |
Keywords: | Cryosphere; Sea ice; Remote sensing; Arctic |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst for Climate & Atmos Science (ICAS) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NERC No External Reference |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 08 Nov 2017 11:43 |
Last Modified: | 24 Aug 2018 14:25 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.asr.2017.10.051 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:123597 |