Evaluation of Arctic Sea Ice Drift Products Based on FY-3, HY-2, AMSR2, and SSMIS Radiometer Data

Abstract

Different radiometer sensors have different frequencies, spatial resolutions, and time resolutions, which lead to inconsistencies in ice drift products retrieved by radiometer sensors. Based on the continuous maximum cross-correlation method, in this paper, we used China’s FY-3 and HY-2 satellite radiometer data to generate sea ice drift products; we further evaluated the consistency between them and sea ice drift products retrieved from AMSR2 and SSMIS satellite radiometer data, which could help in future retrieval accuracies of more radiometer sea ice drift products. The results show that ice drift products with good reliability can be obtained by retrievals using 37 and 89 GHz channels of FY-3 and HY-2 radiometer bright temperature data. Compared with the buoy data, the root mean square errors (RMSEs) of the 37 GHz HY-2 sea ice drift product (at an interval of 6 days) were 1.40 cm/s and 7.31° for speed and direction, respectively, and the relative errors (REs) were 5.78% and 6.44%, respectively. The RMSEs of the 37 GHz FY-3 sea ice drift product were 0.77 cm/s and 6.49° for speed and direction, respectively, and the REs were 4.38% and 9.23%, respectively. Moreover, comparisons between sea ice drift vectors derived from AMSR2 and SSMIS satellites showed good quantitative agreement.