Snow depth and sea ice thickness derived from the measurements of SIMBA buoy 2020T79

• Main Authors: Lei, Ruibo, Cheng, Bin, Hoppmann, Mario, Zuo, Guangyu
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2021
• Subjects: 2020T79; PRIC_10_07; Arctic Ocean; DATE/TIME; ice thickness; LATITUDE; LONGITUDE; Manual identification method; mass balance; Mosaic; MOSAiC20192020; Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate; Polarstern; PS122/3; PS122/3_28-92; PS122/4; PS122/4_43-155; SAMS Ice Mass Balance buoy; Sea ice; SIMBA; snow depth; Snow thickness; Arctic
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.938243; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.938243

The Snow and Ice Mass Balance Array (SIMBA) is a thermistor string type IMB (Jackson et al., 2013) which measures the environment temperature SIMBA-ET and temperature change around the thermistors after a weak heating applied to each sensor (SIMBA-HT). Totally, there were 22 SIMBAs deployed in the Arcitic Ocean over the Distributed Network (DN) and the Central Observatory during the Legs 1a, 1 and 3 of the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) campaign. The SIMBA thermistor chain is 5.12 m long, and equipped with 256 thermistors (Maxim Integrated DS28EA00) at 0.02 m spacing. Based on a manual identification method, the SIMBA-ET and SIMBA-HT were processed to yield snow depth and ice thickness. Here, we combined the two optimal methods (the ET vertical gradient and HT rise ratio) to reduce the uncertainty. To keep the consistency, we use the snow or ice surface, consequentially the snow depth, determined by the ET vertical gradient. The formations of snow ice and superposed ice are not considered in this data set. That is to say, the value of snow depth includes the layers of snow ice at two sites (2019T56 and 2019T72). The superposed ice was generally negligible. We used the HT rise ratio to determine the ice-water interface, consequentially the ice thickness. Overall, the measurement accuracy was 0.02 m for both the snow depth and ice thickness. After the snow cover melted over, the negative values for the snow depth indicate the onset of ice surface melt.