Observing the Relationship Between Freeboard, Snow Depth, and Sea-Ice
Thickness: Recent Advances in the AWI IceBird Campaigns
Abstract
Alfred Wegener Institute’s (AWI) IceBird program is a series of airborne
campaigns carried out in winter and summer using a fixed-wing Basler
BT-67 research aircraft to measure Arctic sea ice and to monitor its
change. In 2017, the primary scientific instrument configuration
including an airborne laser scanner (ALS) for surface topography and
freeboard measurements and a tethered electromagnetic induction sounding
instrument (EM-Bird) for total (snow+ice) thickness measurements was
complemented with an ultrawideband frequency-modulated continuous-wave
microwave radar to measure snow thickness. With the unique
instrumentation onboard the IceBird campaigns, we are able to observe
the respective thicknesses of the snow and sea-ice layers in high
resolution along survey tracks on regional scale. Here, we describe the
IceBird program concept and focus on the winter campaigns that take
advantage of the full instrument configuration. We present recent data
of high-resolution, collocated, airborne sea-ice and snow thickness and
freeboard measurements based on over 3000 km of profiles collected in
the western Arctic Ocean in April 2017 and 2019. The individual
parameters are important for describing and monitoring the state of the
Arctic sea ice and validating retrievals from satellite data, but
combined they offer further possibilities to characterize sea ice. By
assuming isostatic equilibrium, we are able to derive up-to-date
estimates for sea-ice bulk density for first-year and multi-year ice,
including deformed ice. As an outlook, we derive a parametrization of
sea-ice bulk density based on sea-ice freeboard for further
applications, such as evaluating the freeboard-to-thickness conversion
for satellite altimetry.