Abstract
Arctic sea ice coverage has changed considerably over the last few
decades. Sea ice extent record minimums have been observed in recent
years, the distribution of sea ice age now heavily favors younger ice,
and sea ice is thinning. To investigate the response of the ice pack to
climate forcing during summertime melt, we have developed a technique to
track individual Arctic sea ice parcels along with associated properties
as these parcels advect through the Arctic Ocean. This sea ice parcel
tracking method utilizes our sea ice motion dataset, archived at NASA’s
National Snow and Ice Data Center. Tracked sea ice parcel locations
coincide with other environmental products that influence sea ice
growth/decay. We have recently tracked variables such as ice surface
temperature, albedo, ice concentration, and ice thickness for hundreds
of sea ice parcels, defined as occupying one EASE-grid cell location.
These parcels can be tracked through a melt season, to determine the
influence of these properties on sea ice melt, along with determining
what fraction of the parcels survive or don’t survive summer melt. This
analysis can be applied to determine the impact of these and other
properties on ice melt, in terms of their relative importance. Here, we
focus on tracking recent sea ice freeboard, produced from NASA’s
ICESat-2 observations. We look at the evolution of ice thickness for
individual parcels through the recent ICESat-2 record, to determine the
rate of ice growth over part or all of the winter, depending on product
availability (as of this writing, freeboard is available through Dec 27,
2018). We determine how sea ice growth varies for hundreds of parcels,
and determine how growth is affected by location and time.