Arctic Sea Ice Thickness Estimation from Icesat-2 Using Different Parameter Schemes

Abstract

This paper estimated Arctic monthly sea ice thickness (SIT) using the ICESat-2 gridded monthly sea ice freeboard product (ATL20) with the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium. Different snow and ice parameters are applied to illustrate the effects of auxiliary data on the SIT retrievals. Snow depth data are from three sources including climatology observation, microwave remote sensing and reanalysis data, while six snow/ice density combination schemes were adopted. The results show the averaged monthly sea ice freeboard from ICESat-2 ATL20 product well captures the seasonal variation of sea ice freeboard and sea ice growth in Arctic winter, which can be further used to estimate SIT. The difference of monthly SIT from different snow and ice density schemes is smaller than that caused by snow depth. Overall, the largest difference caused by snow depth in mean SIT is ~0.50 m, while that caused by the snow and ice density is ~0. 15 m. The best parameter scheme of SIT inversion using ICESat-2 needs to be further investigated using field measurements in the future.