Spatial resolution improvement of sea ice maps prescribed to Regional Arctic Shelf Ocean Models by using Special Sensor Microwave/Imager 85 GHz data

Numerical Regional Arctic Shelf Ocean (NRASO) models used to investigate the heat and salt budget of the shelf oceans in the remote areas of the Arctic need sea ice maps for validation and improvement. The spatial resolution of these maps - often based on spaceborne passive microwave data, e.g. the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I), - is of the order of 1000 kM/sup 2/. However, the HAMburg Shelf Ocean Model HAMSOM has a grid cell size of /spl ap/ 60 km/sup 2/ which will improve to /spl ap/ 6 km/sup 2/, and therefore will definitely need ice maps with a finer spatial resolution. This paper shows that using different approaches based on SSM/I 85 GHz data can make a significant improvement.