A Database of Weekly Sea Ice Parcel Tracks Derived from Lagrangian Motion Data with Ancillary Data Products

Abstract

Arctic sea ice has been on the decline over the past several decades, and multi-year sea ice has decreased significantly in its areal share of the overall sea ice cover. Changes in several key variables such as radiative balances, albedo, ice surface temperature, and ice thickness have driven much of the decline, but the motion of sea ice makes studying the effects of these variables on individual parcels difficult. Previous studies have observed changes in the means of these variables and their impacts on sea ice concentration, but an accessible database of Lagrangian tracked data is not yet available for study. In order to address this, a database has been developed at the University of Colorado Boulder that performs Lagrangian tracking on individual sea ice parcels and saves coincident ancillary thermodynamic and dynamic variables for each parcel on a weekly timescale.

Keywords

• sea ice
• data descriptor
• climate
• Lagrangian tracking
• cryosphere
• EASE-Grid