PHY-01 The Arctic Ocean: Physics, climate & ecosystem
Arctic sea ice deformation from passive microwave imagery
Qian Shi* , School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), China
Robert Ricker, NORCE Norwegian Research Centre, Norway
QInghua Yang, School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), China

Sea ice deformation plays a key role in the spatial distribution of sea ice thickness. We aim to map the large-scale Arctic sea ice deformation with ice motion data based on passive-microwave (PM) data in winter. The sea ice deformation derived from the OSI SAF merged (OSI-405-c) data reveals the best results among six PM sea ice deformation data sets with respect to Sentinel-1 derived sea ice deformation. In general, the PM sea ice deformation overestimates the deformation. Then, this overestimation of OSI-405-cs deformation is corrected with a power-law scaling method based on the SAR-derived strain rates. We found that the new corrected strain rates can well reproduce the unusual ice convergence in March 2017 in the Beaufort Sea. In winter, the sea ice convergence/divergence is highly spatially correlated with the dynamic increases/decreases and thermodynamic decrease/increase of ice thickness in the Beaufort Sea and the Laptev Sea.