Unified Sea Ice Thickness Climate Data Record

NASA Operation IceBridge Program Office, Goddard Space Flight Center

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/icebridge/

All flights with usable data are combined for each campaign. Annual campaigns are conducted in the appropriate spring based either in Greenaland or Punta Arenas, Chile. Currently we have only '2009-Grnlnd'.

The 'Freeboard, Snow Depth, and Ice Thickness' data product from NSIDC was used to form 50-km clusters, combining data from more than one flight if the flights were less than 10 days apart. The spacing of the point thickness estimates is approximately 25 m. The original data set includes a variable for the uncertainty in the estimated ice thickness that is used to select points with an uncertainty of less than 1 m for very thin ice up to 2 m for ice greater than 4 m thick. The maximum uncertainty in the point measurements included in the clusters is 2 m. Clusters were required to have 500 or more point samples to be retained and some clusters have as many as 7000 points. The average is 1670 points.

In the summary file the minimum, maximum, mean, and standard deviation is given for the snow depth, the uncertainty in the ice thickness, and the ice thickness. See the file headers. The mean uncertainty is not the uncertainty of the mean because we do not know how the errors are correlated, but it does give some information about the relative confidence in the sample estimates. If the errors were uncorrelated the uncertaity in the mean would be approximately 1/sqrt(nsamps) times the mean uncertainty.

2009-Grnlnd: 4 flights, 98509 point estimates, 59 50-km clutser averages

2010-Grnlnd: 6 flights, 213927 point estimates, 178 50-km clusters

2011-Grnlnd: 6 flights, 150023 point estimates, 132 50-km clusters

The 20-m point data for ice thickness is at the National Snow and Ice Data Center as well as all of the clibrated instrument data.

Kurtz, Nathan, Michael Studinger, Jeremy Harbeck, Vincent-De-Paul Onana, and Sinead Farrell. 2012, updated to current year. IceBridge Sea Ice Freeboard, Snow Depth, and Thickness, [list dates of data used]. Boulder, Colorado USA: NASA Distributed Active Archive Center at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Digital media. http://nsidc.org/data/idcsi2.html.