Abstract
The detection, monitoring, and forecasting of sea-ice conditions, including their extremes, is very important for ship navigation and offshore activities, and for monitoring of sea-ice processes and trends. We summarize here recent advances in the monitoring of sea-ice conditions and their extremes from satellite data as well as the development of sea-ice seasonal forecasting capabilities. Our results are the outcome of the three-year (2015–2018) SPICES (Space-borne Observations for Detecting and Forecasting Sea-Ice Cover Extremes) project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme. New SPICES sea-ice products include pancake ice thickness and degree of ice ridging based on synthetic aperture radar imagery, Arctic sea-ice volume and export derived from multisensor satellite data, and melt pond fraction and sea-ice concentration using Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) radiometer data. Forecasts of July sea-ice conditions from initial conditions in May showed substantial improvement in some Arctic regions after adding sea-ice thickness (SIT) data to the model initialization. The SIT initialization also improved seasonal forecasts for years with extremely low summer sea-ice extent. New SPICES sea-ice products have a demonstrable level of maturity, and with a reasonable amount of further work they can be integrated into various operational sea-ice services.
Highlights
The detection, monitoring, and forecasting, both in short and seasonal time scales, of sea-ice conditions and their extremes is very important for ship navigation and offshore activities, and for monitoring of sea-ice processes and trends
New SPICES sea-ice products include pancake ice thickness and degree of ice ridging based on synthetic aperture radar imagery, Arctic sea-ice volume and export derived from multisensor satellite data, and melt pond fraction and sea-ice concentration using Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) radiometer data
New sea-ice products developed in SPICES are based on a wide variety of Earth Observation (EO) data obtained from multiple satellite sensors, and numerical weather prediction (NWP) model data
Summary
The detection, monitoring, and forecasting, both in short and seasonal time scales, of sea-ice conditions and their extremes is very important for ship navigation and offshore activities, and for monitoring of sea-ice processes and trends. These models are often initialized using satellite observations of SIC, but other sea-ice parameters may be possible to include for producing better forecasts. We summarize recent advances in detection of sea-ice conditions and their extremes, both on global and regional scales, from satellite data, as well as development of relevant sea-ice seasonal forecasting capabilities. They are the outcomes of the three-year (2015–2018) SPICES (Space-borne Observations for Detecting and Forecasting Sea-Ice Cover Extremes) project, funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme [9]. Abbreviations and symbols used in the paper are collected at the end of the paper
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