Atmospheric forcing of sea ice anomalies in the Ross Sea polynya region

Dale, Ethan R.; McDonald, Adrian J.; Coggins, Jack H. J.; Rack, Wolfgang

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-267-2017

Articles | Volume 11, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-267-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-267-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 1

Research article

|

27 Jan 2017

Research article |

| 27 Jan 2017

Atmospheric forcing of sea ice anomalies in the Ross Sea polynya region

Ethan R. Dale, Adrian J. McDonald, Jack H. J. Coggins, and Wolfgang Rack

Data sets

Bootstrap Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS, Version 2 J. C. Comiso https://doi.org/10.5067/J6JQLS9EJ5HU

Short summary

This work studies the affects of strong winds on sea ice within the Ross Sea polynya. We compare both automatic weather station (AWS) and reanalysis wind data with sea ice concentration (SIC) measurements based on satellite images. Due to its low resolution, the reanalysis data were unable to reproduce several relationships found between the AWS and SIC data. We find that the strongest third of wind speeds had the most significant affect on SIC and resulting sea ice production.