New Advanced AMSR2 Sea Ice Products for Forecasters and Ice Analysts

Supported by the JPSS Proving Ground and Risk Reduction (PGRR) Program, we have made available spatially enhanced (3.125 km) Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-2 (AMSR2) imagery and 6.25 km sea ice concentration (SIC) products in near real time to forecasters and ice analysts at the Alaska Sea Ice Program (ASIP) and the US National Ice Center (USNIC). These organizations have incorporated our enhanced AMSR2 imagery into their daily operations since 2022.

ASIP forecasters have found the enhanced imagery to be a “vast improvement” over the original imagery, becoming a part of their daily routine in tracking ice in remote, often poorly observed areas. There can be long periods where either high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is unavailable or clouds are obscuring imagery from optical sensors, but the enhanced AMSR2 imagery has “helped immensely” in those cases. The enhanced imagery also allows the ice analyst to make detailed changes to the analysis that simply was not possible with the original product.

Ice analysts at the USNIC have stated that the enhanced imagery is “a great source of information on the sea ice when there are gaps in available imagery and a good confidence dataset when a visible satellite image is cloudy.” One of their analysts “who deployed on the USCGC Healy found great use in it when broader situational awareness was requested from the officers onboard.” As summarized by Sofia M. Montalvo (USNIC operational technical director), the enhanced AMSR2 imagery is the “most consistent source of sea ice information compared to the other SAR and visible sources with data outages,” especially in the southern hemisphere.

ASIP users also make use of the enhanced AMSR2 SIC products, which are “much cleaner, less noisy” than the standard AMSR2 SIC products, exhibit “much better” gradients, and allow them to see “very low concentration areas within the ice pack.” These products also help to fill in gaps if needed, or independently track the ice edge and marginal ice zone with a degree of confidence they were not able to achieve with the standard AMSR2 sea ice concentration.

In the fourth year of our project, we are focusing on making available new 3.125/6.25 km sea ice motion products and an experimental higher resolution (3.125 km) sea ice concentration product. Forecasters at ASIP have used the enhanced AMSR2 imagery to track ice motion to inform their end users, and have expressed interest in an ice motion product. Our poster will present examples of these new products, which we hope can include initial impressions from users.