Retrievals of Arctic Sea-Ice Volume and Its Trend Significantly Affected by Interannual Snow Variability

Abstract

We estimate the uncertainty of satellite-retrieved Arctic sea-ice thickness, sea-ice volume, and their trends stemming from the lack of reliable snow-thickness observations. To do so, we simulate a Cryosat2-type ice-thickness retrieval in an ocean-model simulation forced by atmospheric reanalysis, pretending that only freeboard is known as model output. We then convert freeboard to sea-ice thickness using different snow climatologies and compare the resulting sea-ice thickness retrievals to each other and to the real sea-ice thickness of the reanalysis-forced simulation. We find that different snow climatologies cause significant differences in the obtained ice thickness and ice volume. In addition, we show that Arctic ice-volume trends derived from ice-thickness retrievals using any snow-depth climatology are highly unreliable because the estimated trend in ice volume can strongly be influenced by the neglected interannual variability in snow volume.