Reassessing the Quality of Sea‐Ice Deformation Estimates Derived From the RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System and Its Impact on the Spatiotemporal Scaling Statistics

Abstract

AbstractWe reassess the trajectory errors inherent to sea‐ice deformation estimates with a new propagation of uncertainty derivation and show that previous formulations applied to deformation estimates from the RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System (RGPS) are either too high due to incorrect assumptions or too low due to neglected terms in certain cases. We show that when the resulting signal‐to‐noise ratios are used to discriminate the deformation estimates based on their quality, as done for buoy records, the spatiotemporal scaling exponents for the mean total deformation rate increase, especially at smaller scale, such that a space‐time coupling of the scaling—which is otherwise absent—emerges from the RGPS deformation data set, in accord with previous analyses performed with buoy observations. We also show that the preprocessing method used to reduce the effects of irregular sampling of the Lagrangian deformation fields can significantly impact the value of the deformation statistics and could possibly explain part of previous discrepancies between deformation statistics obtained with buoy records and large‐scale synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. Specifically, we show that spurious lines of deformation appear when interpolating RGPS trajectories that presenttemporal sampling inconsistencies. In the context of using observed sea‐ice deformation statistics to constrain and improve the performance of sea‐ice models, high confidence in the observed deformation field statistics is necessary. Using appropriate, well‐documented, methods to derive the set of statistics to be reproduced by models therefore becomes crucial.