Quantitative characterisation of sea ice melt stages in the Arctic by means of airborne photographs

• Main Author: Schwarz, Pascal
• Format: Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Arctic; albedo; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/34794/; https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/34794/1/Schwarz_2013_diploma_thesis.pdf; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.42970; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.42970.d001

During the melt season, the surface conditions of the Arctic sea ice cover change enormously. The uniform high reflective winter surface transforms to a heterogeneous compound of several surface classes. This change is associated with a strong decrease of the surface albedo, caused by the melting snow cover, the formation of melt ponds and the increase of open water fraction. The goal of this work is to classify images from the MELTEX 2008, NOGRAM 2011 and TIFAX 2010 flight campaigns to determine melt pond parameters, such as concentration, size, size distribution, density, density distribution, shape and shape distribution. These are important quantities for the sea ice atmosphere interaction. A further objective is to evaluate the broadband albedo measurements of the MELTEX campaign. Overall the work gives a quantitative description of the sea ice melt stages by means of the evaluated quantities mentioned above.