A new Arctic MSS model derived from combined Cryosat-2 and ICESat observations

Due to the existence of seasonal or perennial sea ice cover, the determination of the Arctic sea surface is more difficult than that of mid-low latitudinal oceans. Focusing on the sea surface height in the ice-covered region, this paper constructs a new Arctic mean sea surface (MSS) model, named SUS...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International Journal of Digital Earth
Main Authors: Guodong Chen, Zhijie Zhang, Stine Kildegaard Rose, Ole Baltazar Andersen, Shengjun Zhang, Taoyong Jin
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2022
Subjects:
mss
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2022.2153181
https://doaj.org/article/2cf7bc4475934d4180e4e9ee20d58e54
Description
Summary:Due to the existence of seasonal or perennial sea ice cover, the determination of the Arctic sea surface is more difficult than that of mid-low latitudinal oceans. Focusing on the sea surface height in the ice-covered region, this paper constructs a new Arctic mean sea surface (MSS) model, named SUST22, by combining the measurements from ICESat and Cryosat-2 missions. The lead detection methods of ICESat and Cryosat-2 are first studied and modified to acquire sea surface measurements with better accuracy. The results have shown that the standard deviation of Cryosat-2-derived Arctic sea surface height is about 3–4 cm in 10-km resolution grids, while the value of ICESat is 5–6 cm. Then the MSS construction procedure is discussed and the SUST22 MSS model is constructed. The new model is compared with the other four Arctic MSS models. The best agreement is found between SUST22 and DTU21 with an average difference of −4.0 ± 5.2 cm. These models are also validated by ICESat-2 samples. The average difference between ICESat-2 and SUST22 is 15.8 ± 7.4 cm, which shows that the new model SUST22 presents better consistency with the ICESat-2 than any of the other models.