Proposed Development of a Joint Scientific - Operational Arctic-Wide Sea Ice Product

摘要

Understanding the large-scale distribution and characteristics of the sea-ice cover in the Arctic has been a major objective of both the scientific and operational sea-ice communities for many years. For the scientific community, the primary motivation is to define the key factors that influence decadal-scale variations in sea-ice coverage. For the operational community, the motivation is to obtain early season indicators of ice conditions and to have guidance in producing higher-resolution regional analyses. what is often overlooked is that fact that the information requirements of these two communities overlap to a considerable degree at this 'global' scale of coverage (with a spatial resolution of the order of 10 km). Given this strong, broadly- based and long-standing interest, it is important to ask how far we have come towards achieving the goal of being able to monitor the state of the Arctic reliably and accurately. The development of space-borne passive microwave sensors in the 1970s represented a significant step forward in the development of this capability, and many of the techniques which form the basis for sea-ice models were also developed during that decade. However, although new space-borne sensors (such as synthetic aperture radar), ground observations (such as those provided by the International Arctic Buoy Program) and increasingly reliable weather fields (such as those from ECMWF and FNMOC) have appeared since then, there has been remarkably little development in the capability to combine these resources to provide a high quality, synthesized Arctic-wide sea-ice product. Yet, the implementation of such a product would mark a major milestone in the move towards maturity of the sea-ice monitoring community and would have ramifications well beyond the field of sea-ice research.