Variability of Arctic Cloudiness from the TOVS Polar Pathfinder Data Set

Our knowledge about the variability of Arctic Cloudiness has been vary limited. We basically know its annual cycle and have a rough climatological sense that some areas are cloudier than others.

This is changing. Satellite-derived data sets from the NASA Polar Pathfinder projects allow us to go beyond this and investigate the temporal and spatial variability of clouds in the the polar regions.

In this paper we will present results using the TOVS Polar Pathfinder project. We will investigate the temporal and spatial variability of clouds and study the effect of this variability on sea-ice through coupled ice-ocean modeling experiments for the period 1980-2000.