Deriving Antarctic Sea-Ice Thickness From Satellite Altimetry and Estimating Consistency for NASA's ICESat/ICESat-2 Missions

Yue Xu; Huan Li; Baojian Liu; Hongjie Xie; Burcu Ozsoy-Cicek

doi:10.1029/2021GL093425

Deriving Antarctic Sea-Ice Thickness From Satellite Altimetry and Estimating Consistency for NASA's ICESat/ICESat-2 Missions

Yue Xu, Huan Li^*, Baojian Liu, Hongjie Xie, Burcu Ozsoy-Cicek

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Maritime Transportation and Management Engineering

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

21 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

With the launch of the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), densely measuring the Antarctic ocean all year long, monthly sea ice thickness changes can be inspected. However, the consistency between ICESat-2 and its predecessor ICESat remains unknown if a long-term change of the Antarctic sea ice thickness is to be examined. Due to the complex physical structure of Antarctic sea ice, an improved One-Layer Method (OLMi) for sea-ice thickness retrieval, with an ∼0.3 m uncertainty, is proposed in this study. Using this method, the monthly sea ice variation in each sea sector of Antarctica from ICESat-2 is inspected, revealing detailed characteristics of Antarctic sea ice over sector scale such as bi-modal distributions. The different retrieving methods for the total freeboard from ICESat are found to be ∼0.036 m lower than that from ICESat-2. The circum-Antarctic sea ice thickness shows a decreasing tendency (2003–2020), especially in summer with −0.014 m/yr.

Original language	English
Article number	e2021GL093425
Journal	Geophysical Research Letters
Volume	48
Issue number	20
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL093425
Publication status	Published - 28 Oct 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.

Funding

This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41901346) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2019M650348). We want to thank Professor Steve Ackley for proofreading the paper and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments to greatly improve the paper.

Funders	Funder number
National Natural Science Foundation of China	41901346
China Postdoctoral Science Foundation	2019M650348

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10.1029/2021GL093425

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abstract = "With the launch of the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), densely measuring the Antarctic ocean all year long, monthly sea ice thickness changes can be inspected. However, the consistency between ICESat-2 and its predecessor ICESat remains unknown if a long-term change of the Antarctic sea ice thickness is to be examined. Due to the complex physical structure of Antarctic sea ice, an improved One-Layer Method (OLMi) for sea-ice thickness retrieval, with an ∼0.3 m uncertainty, is proposed in this study. Using this method, the monthly sea ice variation in each sea sector of Antarctica from ICESat-2 is inspected, revealing detailed characteristics of Antarctic sea ice over sector scale such as bi-modal distributions. The different retrieving methods for the total freeboard from ICESat are found to be ∼0.036 m lower than that from ICESat-2. The circum-Antarctic sea ice thickness shows a decreasing tendency (2003–2020), especially in summer with −0.014 m/yr.",

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AU - Ozsoy-Cicek, Burcu

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Deriving Antarctic Sea-Ice Thickness From Satellite Altimetry and Estimating Consistency for NASA's ICESat/ICESat-2 Missions

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

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