Monitoring evolution of melt ponds on first-year and multiyear sea ice in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago with optical satellite data

The evolution of melt ponds on Arctic sea ice in summer is one of the main factors that affect sea-ice albedo and hence the polar climate system. Due to the different spectral properties of open water, melt pond and sea ice, the melt pond fraction (MPF) can be retrieved using a fully constrained lea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annals of Glaciology
Main Authors: Qing Li, Chunxia Zhou, Lei Zheng, Tingting Liu, Xiaotong Yang
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1017/aog.2020.24
https://doaj.org/article/2263f9db4d4f448e8c187976584d5459
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Summary:The evolution of melt ponds on Arctic sea ice in summer is one of the main factors that affect sea-ice albedo and hence the polar climate system. Due to the different spectral properties of open water, melt pond and sea ice, the melt pond fraction (MPF) can be retrieved using a fully constrained least-squares algorithm, which shows a high accuracy with root mean square error ~0.06 based on the validation experiment using WorldView-2 image. In this study, the evolution of ponds on first-year and multiyear ice in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago was compared based on Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 images. The relationships of pond coverage with air temperature and albedo were analysed. The results show that the pond coverage on first-year ice changed dramatically with seasonal maximum of 54%, whereas that on multiyear ice changed relatively flat with only 30% during the entire melting period. During the stage of pond formation, the ponds expanded rapidly when the temperature increased to over 0°C for three consecutive days. Sea-ice albedo shows a significantly negative correlation (R = −1) with the MPF in melt season and increases gradually with the refreezing of ponds and sea ice.