Inferring Changes in Arctic Sea Ice through a Spatio-Temporal Logistic Autoregression Fitted to Remote-Sensing Data

Arctic sea ice extent (SIE) has drawn increasing attention from scientists in recent years because of its fast decline in the Boreal summer and early fall. The measurement of SIE is derived from remote sensing data and is both a lagged and leading indicator of climate change. To characterize at a lo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Bohai Zhang, Furong Li, Huiyan Sang, Noel Cressie
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022
Subjects:
boxplot time series
climate change
dynamic spatio-temporal model
reflected solar radiation
sea ice extent
Science
Q
Arctic
Climate change
Sea ice
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14235995
https://doaj.org/article/d37a10cad0e04eb0a405e9759fa6cfa6
Description
Summary:Arctic sea ice extent (SIE) has drawn increasing attention from scientists in recent years because of its fast decline in the Boreal summer and early fall. The measurement of SIE is derived from remote sensing data and is both a lagged and leading indicator of climate change. To characterize at a local level the decline in SIE, we use remote-sensing data at 25 km resolution to fit a spatio-temporal logistic autoregressive model of the sea-ice evolution in the Arctic region. The model incorporates last year’s ice/water binary observations at nearby grid cells in an autoregressive manner with autoregressive coefficients that vary both in space and time. Using the model-based estimates of ice/water probabilities in the Arctic region, we propose several graphical summaries to visualize the spatio-temporal changes in Arctic sea ice beyond what can be visualized with the single time series of SIE. In ever-higher latitude bands, we observe a consistently declining temporal trend of sea ice in the early fall. We also observe a clear decline in and contraction of the sea ice’s distribution between <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><msup><mn>70</mn><mo>∘</mo></msup><mi mathvariant="normal">N</mi></mrow></semantics></math> – <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><msup><mn>75</mn><mo>∘</mo></msup><mi mathvariant="normal">N</mi></mrow></semantics></math> , and of most concern is that this may reflect the future behavior of sea ice at ever-higher latitudes under climate change.

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