Baffin Bay sea ice inflow and outflow: 1978–1979 to 2016–2017

Bi, Haibo; Zhang, Zehua; Wang, Yunhe; Xu, Xiuli; Liang, Yu; Huang, Jue; Liu, Yilin; Fu, Min

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1025-2019

Articles | Volume 13, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1025-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1025-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 3

Research article

|

29 Mar 2019

Research article |

| 29 Mar 2019

Baffin Bay sea ice inflow and outflow: 1978–1979 to 2016–2017

Haibo Bi, Zehua Zhang, Yunhe Wang, Xiuli Xu, Yu Liang, Jue Huang, Yilin Liu, and Min Fu

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1025-2019-supplement

Data sets

Polar Pathfinder Daily 25 km EASE-Grid Sea Ice Motion Vectors, Version 4 M. Tschudi, W. N. Meier, J. S. Stewart, C. Fowler, and J. Maslanik https://doi.org/10.5067/INAWUWO7QH7B

Bootstrap Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS, Version 3 J. C. Comiso https://doi.org/10.5067/7Q8HCCWS4I0R

Short summary

Baffin Bay serves as a huge reservoir of sea ice which provides solid freshwater sources for the seas downstream. Based on satellite observations, significant increasing trends are found for the annual sea ice area flux through the three gates. These trends are chiefly related to the increasing ice motion which is associated with thinner ice owing to the warmer climate (i.e., higher surface air temperature and shortened freezing period) and increased air and water drag coefficients.