Publications

Fang, Y; Wang, X; Chen, ZQ; Li, G; Hui, FM; Cheng, X (2023). Summer sea ice drift tracking and variation analysis in Fram Strait from 2011 to 2020. CHINESE JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICS-CHINESE EDITION, 66(7), 2726-2740.

Abstract
Accurate sea ice drift information in Fram Strait plays important roles in quantifying the sea ice export through Fram Strait and reducing the uncertainty of the Arctic sea ice loss estimation. Due to the limitations of data sources and algorithms, the existing methods show poor performance in summer sea ice drift retrieval. In this study, a summer daily sea ice drift monitoring method based on time series MODIS data and A-KAZE algorithm was proposed. Furthermore, daily sea ice motions in Fram Strait for 2011-2020 summers (April to September) were retrieved based on the proposed method and the characteristics of sea ice motion in Fram Strait for these ten years were analyzed based on the tracking results. The proposed method was evaluated over a portion of Fram Strait from April 29 to May 5, 2020. The results showed that the proposed method outperformed the classic MCC algorithm in sea ice drift retrieval, with velocity and direction RMSE decreases of 2.13 km center dot d(-1) (73%) and 10 degrees (38%), respectively. Furthermore, the proposed method retrieved more sea ice drift vectors with larger spatial coverage compared with the displacements SIFT and SURF algorithms retrieved. Meanwhile, compared with the daily sea ice motion vectors generated with daily synthetic data, the motion vectors obtained by the proposed method using time series MODIS images covered more areas, with an average increase of 862.62 km(2) (nearly 16 times), which demonstrated that the proposed method greatly reduced the cloud effect on optical data. Furthermore, it was found that the spatial distribution of sea ice velocity in Fram Strait for the last ten years is relatively consistent, showing that the ice velocity in the south of the Strait is higher than that in the north, and the velocity away from the coast is higher than that in the near shore. The annual average summer sea ice velocity in Fram Strait does not show a significant increase or decrease trend, but it shows a downward trend from April to July and an upward trend from August to September. The proposed method provides new idea for daily sea ice drift monitoring in summer and the analysis on summer sea ice velocity in Fram Strait for the last ten years is applicable to the researches such as rapid change of Arctic sea ice.

DOI:
10.6038/cjg2022Q0025

ISSN: