Reply on RC2

Abstract

Seasonal ice cover is one of the important attributes of lakes at middle and high latitude regions. The annual freeze-up and break-up dates and the durations of ice cover (i.e., lake ice phenology) are sensitive to the weather and climate, and hence can be used as an indicator of climate variability and change. The Calibrated Enhanced Resolution Brightness Temperature (CETB) dataset available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) provides an alternate source of passive microwave brightness temperature (TB) measurements for the determination of lake ice phenology on a 3.125 km grid. This study used Scanning Multi-channel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR), Special Sensor Microwave Image (SSM/I) and Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) data from the CETB dataset to extract the ice phenology for 56 lakes across the Northern Hemisphere from 1979 to 2019. According to the differences in TB between lake ice and open water, a threshold algorithm based on the moving t test method was applied to determine the lake ice status for grids located at least 6.25 km away from the lake shore, and the ice phenology dates for each lake were then extracted. When ice phenology could be extracted from more than one satellite over overlapping periods, results from the satellite offering the largest number of observations were prioritized. The lake ice phenology results showed strong agreement with an existing product derived from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR-2) data (2002 to 2015), with mean absolute errors of ice dates ranging from 2 to 4 days. Compared to near-shore in-situ observations, the lake ice results, while different in terms of spatial coverage, still showed overall consistencies. The produced lake ice record also displayed significant consistencies when compared to a historical record of annual maximum ice cover of the Laurentian Great Lakes of North America. From 1979 to 2019, the average complete freezing duration and ice cover duration for lakes forming a complete ice cover on an annual basis were 153 and 161 days, respectively. The lake ice phenology dataset – a new climate data record (CDR) – will provide valuable information to the user community about the changing ice cover of lakes in the last four decades. The dataset is available at https://www.pangaea.de/tok/c8fc0eab3d30777fc38979ad514217b6b7e86a65 (Cai et al., 2021).