Comparison of Remotely Sensed Sea Ice Concentrations with Reanalysis Dataset in Polar Regions

This paper evaluated the consistency of four microwave remotely sensed sea ice concentration (SIC) products with respect to a reanalysis SIC dataset in polar regions during the period of 2015-2017. The remotely sensed SIC products include the Chinese Feng Yun-3B with enhanced NASA Team (NT2) sea ice algorithm (FY3B/NT2), the Chinese Feng Yun-3C with NT2 (FY3C/NT2), the DMSP SSMIS with Arctic Radiation and Turbulence Interaction Study Sea Ice (ASI) algorithm (SSMIS/ASI), and the GCOM-W AMSR2 with NASA Bootstrap (BT) algorithm (AMSR2/BT). The OISSTV2 (NOAA Optimum Interpolation 1/4 Degree Daily Temperature Analysis Version 2) dataset was adopted as a reference to compare and evaluate the performance of four satellite-based SIC products. The results show that remotely sensed SIC values are generally in good consistency with OISSTV2. Meanwhile, it is observed that different products have different bias in polar regions. Overall, the SSMIS/ASI product has better performance during the whole period, demonstrating that ASI algorithm may be more potential in SIC estimation. Our results also illustrate the spatial and temporal distribution characteristic of discrepancy between microwave remotely sensed SIC products and reanalysis dataset for the whole Arctic and Antarctic regions. The large difference for all the four SIC products mostly occurs in summer and marginal ice zone, indicating a great deal of uncertainty of satellite SIC products in this period and areas. The results will be useful to find possible errors in the satellite SIC products for further algorithm improvement.