Follow that ice! Tracking sea ice freeboard in the Arctic Ocean

We have developed a technique to track individual Arctic sea ice parcels as they advect through the Arctic Ocean. This method utilizes our sea ice motion product to create a lagrangian dataset containing hundreds of sea ice parcel trajectories with weekly latitude/longitudes on a 25km EASE-grid. As the sea ice parcels drift, they are periodically overflown by NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite. A gridded sea ice freeboard product derived from the ICESat-2 altimeter allows for the tracking of freeboard for tracks that intersect a significant number of freeboard grid cells. We show a collection of tracked sea ice parcels over a recent year, and track the ICESat-2 sea ice freeboard product to assess the rate of sea ice growth. Simultaneous tracking of ice surface temperature and ice concentration will show the influence of these properties on sea ice growth rates.