A harmonized 2000–2024 dataset of daily river ice concentration and annual phenology for major Arctic rivers

Abstract

River ice plays a critical role in Arctic freshwater routing, navigation safety, and biogeochemical exchange. However, consistent, daily-resolved observations across the pan-Arctic remain scarce. Here we present a harmonized, multi-decadal dataset of daily river ice concentration (RIC) and annual phenology (freeze-up, breakup, and ice duration) for the six largest Arctic rivers – Yukon, Mackenzie, Ob, Yenisey, Lena, and Kolyma – covering hydrological years 2001–2024. Built from >590000 MODIS Terra/Aqua scenes, our workflow integrates a scalable threshold-based classifier on Google Earth Engine with dual-satellite daily synthesis, temporal-window cloud reclassification, and a high-latitude dark-period correction. Technical validation against higher-resolution optical imagery shows a mean RIC accuracy of 0.83 across basins. Phenological metrics derived from MODIS agree with in situ records with mean absolute errors (MAE) of 10.8 d for freeze-up and 11.4 d for breakup (improving to 8.4 d relative to the onset of ice drift), and with Landsat-based river-section phenology with MAE of 10.5 d (freeze-up) and 16.0 d (breakup). RIC correlates strongly with surface air temperature (mean Pearson r=-0.91) and increases systematically with latitude. Trend analysis from 2001 through 2024 shows delayed freeze-up in over 66 % of river segments, earlier breakup in more than 65 %, and shorter ice seasons in over 65 %. On average, freeze-up is delayed by 9.0 d, breakup occurs 7.8 d earlier, and ice duration shortens by 14.1 d over the study period. These basin-consistent, temporally resolved records provide an open benchmark for diagnosing cryospheric change in Arctic river corridors and for constraining model–data intercomparisons. The river-ice dataset is available via Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17054619, Qiu et al., 2025a).