The thickness of the summer ice is challenging to measure from space during the summer. This is because ponds of meltwater can accumulate on the surface of the ice which lead to inaccuracies in satellite data. A paper published in Nature describes how scientists have now found an ingenious way of removing a problem of dazzle from this meltwater in CryoSat data to yield the first ever year-round measurements of sea-ice thickness in the Arctic Ocean.
The photograph shows melting sea ice in the Arctic and was taken during the Alfred Wegener Institute’s airborne sea-ice survey IceBird, which was an airborne campaign for the paper’s research.
Read full story: Taking the dazzle out of CryoSat yields a first