C014-0011
New and improved estimates of the sea ice state from NASA’s ICESat-2 mission

Tuesday, 8 December 2020
Poster
Alek Petty1,2, Ron Kwok3, Marco Bagnardi4, Nathan T Kurtz5, Rachel Tilling2, Alex Cabaj6, Paul J Kushner7 and Nicole Keeney8, (1)Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, COLLEGE PARK, MD, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)Applied Physics Laboratory University of Washington, Polar Science Center, Seattle, United States, (4)Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (5)NASA Goddard, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (6)University of Toronto, Department of Physics, Toronto, ON, Canada, (7)University of Toronto, Physics, Toronto, ON, Canada, (8)University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States
Abstract:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite‐2 (ICESat‐2) mission was launched in September 2018 and is now providing routine, very high‐resolution, surface height and freeboard estimates of the Arctic and Southern Oceans. In work presented at the AGU Fall Meeting 2019 we showcased our new processing chain to convert the official ATL10 freeboard product to estimates of sea ice thickness across the entire Arctic Ocean, utilizing snow depth & density information primarily derived from the NASA Eulerian Snow on Sea Ice (NESOSIM) model. Here we provide an overview of updates made to both the underlying ATL10 freeboard product and the NESOSIM model and the subsequent impacts on our estimates of sea ice thickness, including updated comparisons to the original ICESat and ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission. We also highlight preliminary efforts to derive new information regarding the sea ice state, including lead fraction and chord length (a proxy for floe size).
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