A 12-year climate record of wintertime wave-affected marginal ice zones in the Atlantic Arctic based on CryoSat-2

Abstract

Abstract. The wave-affected marginal ice zone (MIZ) is an essential part of the sea ice cover and crucial to the atmosphere–ice–ocean interaction in the polar region. While we primarily rely on in situ campaigns for studying MIZs, significant challenges exist for the remote sensing of MIZs by satellites. This study develops a novel retrieval algorithm for wave-affected MIZs based on the delay-Doppler radar altimeter on board CryoSat-2 (CS2). CS2 waveform power and waveform stack statistics are used to determine the part of the sea ice cover affected by waves. Based on the CS2 data since 2010, we generate a climate record of wave-affected MIZs in the Atlantic Arctic, spanning 12 winters between 2010 and 2022 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8176585, Zhu et al., 2023). The MIZ record indicates no significant change in the mean MIZ width or the extreme width, although large temporal and spatial variability is present. In particular, extremely wide MIZ events (over 300 km) are observed in the Barents Sea, whereas in other parts of the Atlantic Arctic, MIZ events are typically narrower. We also compare the CS2-based retrieval with the retrievals based on the laser altimeter of ICESat2 and the synthetic aperture radar images from Sentinel-1. Under spatial and temporal collocation, we attain good agreement among the MIZ retrievals based on the three different types of satellite payloads. Moreover, the traditional sea-ice-concentration-based definition of MIZ yields systematically narrower MIZs than CS2, and no statistically significant correlation exists between the two. Beyond its application to CS2, the proposed retrieval algorithm can be adapted to historical and future radar altimetry campaigns. The synergy of multiple satellites can improve the spatial and temporal representation of the altimeters' observation of the MIZs.