A novel approach to retrieve arctic sea ice thickness for prediction and analysis

The overall reduction in sea ice thickness may have profound impact on the Earth's climate system, but currently predictive models do not have consistent sea ice thickness datasets available for improving their results through proper initialization and assimilation. We will present a novel approach to retrieve Arctic sea ice thickness from satellite observations. Our approach offers hemispheric scale sea ice thickness and volume at a temporal resolution shorter than a month (from days to weeks) by utilizing altimetry-derived thickness and passive microwave observations. Our method is validated against the airborne Operation IceBridge measuremnts. Moreover, as an application, we will show the gain obtained when assimilating our basin wide Arcitc sea ice thickness in the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System Model, version 5 (GEOS-5) ocean sea-ice data assimilation system.