Abstract
Meltwater drainage onset (DO) timing and drainage duration (DD) related to snowmelt-water redistribution are both important for understanding not only the Arctic energy and heat budgets but also the salt/heat balance of the mixed layer in the ocean and sea-ice ecosystem. We present DO and DD as determined from the time series of Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth observing system (AMSR-E) melt pond fraction (MPF) estimates in an area with Canadian landfast ice. To address the lack of evaluation on a day-by-day basis for the AMSR-E MPF estimate, we first compared AMSR-E MPF with the daily Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) MPF. The AMSR-E MPF estimate correlates significantly with the MERIS MPF (r = 0.73–0.83). The estimate has a product quality similar to the MERIS MPF only when the albedo is around 0.5–0.7 and a positive bias of up to 10% in areas with an albedo of 0.7–0.9, including melting snow. The DO/DD estimates are determined by using a polynomial regression curve fitted on the time series of the AMSR-E MPF. The DOs/DDs from time series of the AMSR-E and MERIS MPFs are compared, revealing consistency in both DD and DO. The DO timing from 2006 to 2011 is correlated with melt onset timing. To the best of our knowledge, our study provides the first large-scale information on both DO timing and DD.
Highlights
The surface melt of Arctic sea ice begins in early summer, with liquid water pools forming on the ice
This study leads to following results: (1) We evaluated the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth observing system (AMSR-E) melt pond fraction (MPF) estimate [21] by using daily average TB for the AMSR-E L3
This study leads to following results: (1) We evaluated the AMSR-E MPF estimate [21] by using daily average TB for the AMSR-E L3 25 km NSIDC grid data in the CAA, compared it to the daily Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) MPF in the CAA, and found that the relationship between AMSR-E and MERIS MPFs showed a strong correlation of 0.73–0.83, with a low bias of ±2% and RMSE of 8–9%, from 2006 to 2011
Summary
The surface melt of Arctic sea ice begins in early summer, with liquid water pools (called melt ponds) forming on the ice. Schröder et al [4] found that an accurate accounting of melt ponds during the melt season leads to better predictions of sea ice extent in the fall. In the third part of the melt season, sea ice has high permeability and open macroscopic flaws, which accelerate ice floe breakup and disintegration [8]. Superseded the AMSR-E sensor, on the Global Change Observation Mission 1st-Water (GCOM-W1) satellite will extend the continuous record of the MPF, DO, and DD from 2012 to present, when the MPF retrieved from AMSR2 data is evaluated in a future paper. To avoid the contamination of open water in the AMSR-E MPF estimate, we used only the totally ice-covered areas with landfast ice (10/10 sea ice concentration). The ice charts were resampled into 25 km × 25 km NSIDC stereographic projection grids (NSIDC grids)
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