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ISSN 2070-7401 (Print), ISSN 2411-0280 (Online)
Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa
CURRENT PROBLEMS IN REMOTE SENSING OF THE EARTH FROM SPACE

  

Sovremennye problemy distantsionnogo zondirovaniya Zemli iz kosmosa, 2025, V. 22, No. 5, pp. 322-336

Comparison of satellite products on Arctic sea ice drift

E.V. Zabolotskikh 1 , E.V. Lvova 1 , M.D. Kudel 1 , K.I. Yarusov 1 
1 Russian State Hydrometeorological University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Accepted: 19.08.2025
DOI: 10.21046/2070-7401-2025-22-5-322-336
Information about sea ice drift fields in the Arctic helps both predict operational sea ice situation and assess climate changes in the Arctic. Therefore, the accuracy of sea ice drift retrieved from satellite measurements needs to be quantitatively estimated. The paper presents the results of comparing three satellite products on sea ice drift in the Arctic: the product of the American National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the product of the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facilities (OSI SAF), and the product of Ifremer French institute for marine research. A brief overview of the analyzed products and methods of the sea ice drift retrievals is given. The comparison is carried out both for the entire Arctic and for its eight regions: the Central Arctic, the Beaufort Sea, the Chukchi Sea, the East Siberian Sea, the Kara Sea, the Barents Sea, the Laptev Sea, and the Greenland Sea. The comparison is done for spatially averaged and maximum sea ice drift velocities (V) for each region and for the entire Arctic from daily and monthly average data for 2021. The dependence of the differences in sea ice drift fields on the atmospheric water vapor column (WVC) retrieved from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) satellite microwave radiometer data is estimated. It is shown that the monthly average V of the NSIDC and OSI SAF products are close to each other, while the Ifremer product V values significantly exceed the first two, especially for the summer months. The difference in sea ice drift velocities of different products increases with increasing WVC. For independent data verification, sea ice drift data from two International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP) drifting buoys are used, from the East Siberian Sea and the Central Arctic. It is shown that only the NSIDC product is accurate enough to be used both for operational analysis of sea ice conditions and for building long-term time series for climate studies, though in the Russian Arctic seas the accuracy of all the products significantly decreases.
Keywords: Arctic, sea ice, sea ice drift, satellite remote sensing
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