Description: Fram Strait is the main gateway for sea ice export out of the Arctic Ocean, and therefore observations there give insight into the composition and properties of Arctic sea ice in general and how it varies over time. A data set of ground-based and airborne electromagnetic ice thickness measurements collected during summer between 2001 and 2012 is presented here, including long transects well into the southern part of the Transpolar Drift obtained using fixed-wing aircrafts. The primary source of the surveyed sea ice leaving Fram Strait is the Laptev Sea and its age has decreased from 3 to 2 years between 1990 and 2012. The thickness data consistently also show a general thinning of sea ice for the last decade, with a decrease in modal thickness of second year and multiyear ice, and a decrease in mean thickness and fraction of ice thicker than 3 m. Local melting in the strait was investigated in two surveys performed in the downstream direction, showing a decrease in sea ice thickness of 0.19 m degree−1 latitude south of 81° N. Further north variability in ice thickness is more related to differences in age and deformation. The thickness observations were combined with ice area export estimates to calculate summer volume fluxes of sea ice. While satellite data show that monthly ice area export had positive trends since 1980 (10.9  ×  103 km2 decade−1), the summer (July and August) ice area export is low with high uncertainties. The average volume export amounts to 16.78 km3. Naturally, the volume flux estimates are limited to the period when airborne thickness surveys are available. Nevertheless, we could show that the combination of satellite data and airborne observations can be used to determine volume fluxes through Fram Strait and as such, can be used to bridge the lack of satellite-based sea ice thickness information in summer.

Description: Sea ice thickness information is needed for climate modeling and ship operations. Here a method to detect the thickness of sea ice up to 50 cm during the freezeup season based on high incidence angle observations of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite working at 1.4 GHz is suggested. By comparison of thermodynamic ice growth data with SMOS brightness temperatures, a high correlation to intensity and an anti correlation to the difference between vertically and horizontally polarised brightness temperatures at incidence angles between 40 and 50 ° are found and used to develop an empirical retrieval sensitive to thin sea ice up to 50 cm thickness. It shows high correlations with ice thickness data from airborne measurements and reasonable ice thickness patterns for the Arctic freeze up period.

Description: Following the launch of ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean salinity (SMOS) mission it has been shown that brightness temperatures at a low microwave frequency of 1.4 GHz (L-band) are sensitive to sea ice properties. In a first demonstration study, sea ice thickness has been derived using a semi-empirical algorithm with constant tie-points. Here we introduce a novel iterative retrieval algorithm that is based on a sea ice thermodynamic model and a three-layer radiative transfer model, which explicitly takes variations of ice temperature and ice salinity into account. In addition, ice thickness variations within a SMOS footprint are considered through a statistical thickness distribution function derived from high-resolution ice thickness measurements from NASA's Operation IceBridge campaign. This new algorithm has been used for the continuous operational production of a SMOS based sea ice thickness data set from 2010 on. This data set is compared and validated with estimates from assimilation systems, remote sensing data, and airborne electromagnetic sounding data. The comparisons show that the new retrieval algorithm has a considerably better agreement with the validation data and delivers a more realistic Arctic-wide ice thickness distribution than the algorithm used in the previous study.