Two Decades of Arctic Sea-Ice Thickness from Satellite Altimeters: Retrieval Approaches and Record of Changes (2003–2023)
2024
Sahra Kacimi | Ron Kwok
There now exists two decades of basin-wide coverage of Arctic sea ice from three dedicated polar-orbiting altimetry missions (ICESat, CryoSat-2, and ICESat-2) launched by NASA and ESA. Here, we review our retrieval approaches and discuss the composite record of Arctic ice thickness (2003&ndash:2023) after appending two more years (2022&ndash:2023) to our earlier records. The present availability of five years of snow depth estimates&mdash:from differencing lidar (ICESat-2) and radar (CryoSat-2) freeboards&mdash:have benefited from the concurrent operation of two altimetry missions. Broadly, the dramatic volume loss (5500 km3) and Arctic-wide thinning (0.6 m) captured by ICESat (2003&ndash:2009), primarily due to the decline in old ice coverage between 2003 and 2007, has slowed. In the central Arctic, away from the coasts, the CryoSat-2 and shorter ICESat-2 records show near-negligible thickness trends since 2007, where the winter and fall ice thicknesses now hover around 2 m and 1.3 m, from a peak of 3.6 m and 2.7 m in 1980. Ice volume production has doubled between the fall and winter with the faster-growing seasonal ice cover occupying more than half of the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer. Seasonal ice behavior dominates the Arctic Sea ice&rsquo:s interannual thickness and volume signatures.
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