The ongoing loss of Arctic sea ice has not only serious implications for Earth’s climate, but also wide-ranging ecological and socio-economic impacts. The Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) on NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) offers a new remote sensing capability to measure the properties of sea ice at high resolution. Here we provide a brief review of changes underway in the Arctic. We explore the first two years of sea ice retrievals from ICESat-2, demonstrating its capability to track the evolution of the ice cover throughout all seasons. ICESat-2 is capable of measuring fine-scale sea ice details, including narrow pressure ridges and leads just 10 m wide, and small sea ice floes just 20 m across. We also show novel measurements of summer melt pond depths—the first such measurements obtained by a space-based altimeter. Detailed measurements of arctic sea ice provide us with a better understanding of the physical processes shaping the ice cover and offer insights about its vulnerability to further decline.

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Meeting ID: 987 4052 7441
Passcode: 310610