Start of a Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Climatology Using Interactive Multisensor Snow and Ice Mapping System (IMS) Data

The US National Ice Center is seeking to create climatological snow and ice products using datasets generated by the in-house Interactive Multisensor Snow & Ice Mapping System (IMS). The 2021 Lapenta internship project resulted in the creation of an appendable record of IMS snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere. The 2023 Lapenta internship project added sea ice to the record.

This project produced an appendable climatological data record of sea ice cover over the past 17 years using 4km resolution IMS data. A cumulative record of days of ice cover and an average record of days of ice cover over bimonthly (half-month) periods were produced, creating 24 cumulative Geotiff files and 24 average Geotiff files using ArcGIS Pro. IMS data was reclassified to extract daily ice data using ModelBuilder. Next, the reclassified rasters were stacked to create cumulative ice day files. These files were then divided by the number of years in the data record using the ESRI Raster Calculator to create rasters representing the average bi-monthly sea ice extents for 2006 to 2022.