A simple model for daily basin-wide thermodynamic sea ice thickness growth retrieval

• Published in: The Cryosphere
• Main Authors: J. Anheuser, Y. Liu, J. R. Key
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2022
• Subjects: Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Geology; QE1-996.5; Arctic; Sea ice; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-4403-2022; https://doaj.org/article/02f0c297adf54ddf9c3be180cadce9e5

As changes to Earth's polar climate accelerate, the need for robust, long–term sea ice thickness observation datasets for monitoring those changes and for verification of global climate models is clear. By linking an algorithm for retrieving snow–ice interface temperature from passive microwave satellite data to a thermodynamic sea ice energy balance relation known as Stefan's law, we have developed a retrieval method for estimating thermodynamic sea ice thickness growth from space: Stefan's Law Integrated Conducted Energy (SLICE). With an initial condition at the beginning of the sea ice growth season, the method can model basin-wide absolute sea ice thickness by combining the one-dimensional SLICE retrieval with an ice motion dataset. The advantages of the SLICE retrieval method include daily basin-wide coverage, lack of atmospheric reanalysis product input requirement, and a potential for use beginning in 1987. Validation of the retrieval against measurements from 10 ice mass balance buoys shows a mean correlation of 0.89 and a mean bias of 0.06 m over the course of an entire sea ice growth season. Despite its simplifications and assumptions relative to models like the Pan-Arctic Ice–Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS), basin-wide SLICE performs nearly as well as PIOMAS when compared against CryoSat-2 and Operation IceBridge using a linear correlation between collocated points.