Sensitivity of Arctic Sea Ice Extent to Sea Ice Concentration Threshold Choice and Its Implication to Ice Coverage Decadal Trends and Statistical Projections

Matthews, Jessica L.; Peng, Ge; Meier, Walter N.; Brown, Otis

doi:10.3390/rs12050807

i

Sensitivity of Arctic Sea Ice Extent to Sea Ice Concentration Threshold Choice and Its Implication to Ice Coverage Decadal Trends and Statistical Projections

2020
By Matthews, Jessica L. ; Peng, Ge ; Meier, Walter N. ; ...

Details

Journal Title:

Remote Sensing
Personal Author:

Matthews, Jessica L. ; Peng, Ge ; Meier, Walter N. ; Brown, Otis
NOAA Program & Office:

NESDIS (National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service) ; NCEI (National Centers for Environmental Information) ; CISESS (Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies) ; CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences)
Description:

Arctic sea ice extent has been utilized to monitor sea ice changes since the late 1970s using remotely sensed sea ice data derived from passive microwave (PM) sensors. A 15% sea ice concentration threshold value has been used traditionally when computing sea ice extent (SIE), although other threshold values have been employed. Does the rapid depletion of Arctic sea ice potentially alter the basic characteristics of Arctic ice extent? In this paper, we explore whether and how the statistical characteristics of Arctic sea ice have changed during the satellite data record period of 1979–2017 and examine the sensitivity of sea ice extents and their decadal trends to sea ice concentration threshold values. Threshold choice can affect the timing of annual SIE minimums: a threshold choice as low as 30% can change the timing to August instead of September. Threshold choice impacts the value of annual SIE minimums: in particular, changing the threshold from 15% to 35% can change the annual SIE by more than 10% in magnitude. Monthly SIE data distributions are seasonally dependent. Although little impact was seen for threshold choice on data distributions during annual minimum times (August and September), there is a strong impact in May. Threshold choices were not found to impact the choice of optimal statistical models characterizing annual minimum SIE time series. However, the first ice-free Arctic summer year (FIASY) estimates are impacted; higher threshold values produce earlier FIASY estimates and, more notably, FIASY estimates amongst all considered models are more consistent. This analysis suggests that some of the threshold choice impacts to SIE trends may actually be the result of biased data due to surface melt. Given that the rapid Arctic sea ice depletion appears to have statistically changed SIE characteristics, particularly in the summer months, a more extensive investigation to verify surface melt impacts on this data set is warranted.
Keywords:

Climatology Remote Sensing Sea Ice Remote Sensing Sea Ice Arctic Decadal Trend General Earth And Planetary Sciences Passive Microwave Sensors Sea Ice Sea Ice Concentration Sea Ice Extent
Source:

Remote Sensing, 12(5), 807
DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12050807
Document Type:

Journal Article
Funding:

Grant no. NA14NES432003 ; Grant no. ; NA19NES4320002
Rights Information:

CC BY
Compliance:

Submitted
Main Document Checksum:

urn:sha256:57ed49826ce241d7d94734cbf1e61429c6e36c0b866c4acd755c9dfe8d648737
Download URL:

https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/46588/noaa_46588_DS1.pdf
File Type:

[PDF - 1.97 MB ]

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