Oral

IACS

JCP07 - Remote Sensing of Sea Ice from Satellite Microwave Measurements and its Applications

Summer Arctic ice draft variability and trends: 2003-2021

Pan-Arctic observations of summer sea ice thickness have been a challenging problem despite their global significance in weather/climate analysis and prediction. In this study, daily summer pan-Arctic sea ice draft (depth of sea ice below sea surface level) was estimated during 2003?2021 applying a recently developed ice draft estimation method based on a proportional relationship between ice draft and spaceborne passive microwave-measured brightness temperatures. Summer pan-Arctic ice draft distributions showed that Arctic sea ice thickness greatly decreased over the Central Arctic during 2003?2011. Especially, starting in 2007, Arctic sea ice draft thinned dramatically during this period as multiyear sea ice area decreased. However, there is no significant trend during 2013?2021 in most regions due to its large interannual variability. The summer ice draft record in this study has the potential to expand to the long-term summer pan-Arctic ice thickness dataset, which is expected to contribute significantly to advances in the study of global climate change and its mechanisms related to sea ice.