Recent ice cap snowmelt in Russian High Arctic and anti-correlation with late summer sea ice extent

Abstract

Glacier surface melt dynamics throughout Novaya Zemlya (NovZ) and Severnaya Zemlya (SevZ) serve as a good indicator of ice mass ablation and regional climate change in the Russian High Arctic. Here we report trends of surface melt onset date (MOD) and total melt days (TMD) by combining multiple resolution-enhanced active and passive microwave satellite datasets and analyze the TMD correlations with local temperature and regional sea ice extent. The glacier surface snowpack on SevZ melted significantly earlier (−7.3 days/decade) from 1992 to 2012 and significantly longer (7.7 days/decade) from 1995 to 2011. NovZ experienced large interannual variability in MOD, but its annual mean TMD increased. The snowpack melt on NovZ is more sensitive to temperature fluctuations than SevZ in recent decades. After ruling out the regional temperature influence using partial correlation analysis, the TMD on both archipelagoes is statistically anti-correlated with regional late summer sea ice extent, linking land ice snowmelt dynamics to regional sea ice extent variations.

An extended global Earth system data record on daily landscape freeze–thaw status determined from satellite passive microwave remote sensing

“…The FT metric defines the predominant landscape frozen or non-frozen status within a sensor footprint and is insensitive to potential degradation from solar illumination variations and atmosphere cloud/aerosol contamination effects. These properties enable consistent global coverage and daily monitoring from available satellite microwave sensors Zhao et al, 2014). Global satellite microwave sensors have been operational since the mid-1970s, while similar T b observations from overlapping sensor records have enabled the development of one of the longest satellite environmental data records, delineating global daily FT dynamics and associated climate…”

Exceptional retreat of Novaya Zemlya's marine-terminating outlet glaciers between 2000 and 2013

“…Between 2003 and, these glaciated regions lost ice at a rate of between 9.1 Gt a −1 (Moholdt et al, 2012) and 11 Gt a −1 , with over 80 % of mass loss coming from Novaya Zemlya (NVZ) (Moholdt et al, 2012). This much larger contribution from NVZ has been attributed to it experiencing longer melt seasons and high snowmelt variability between 1995 and 2011 (Zhao et al, 2014). More recent estimates suggest that the mass balance of the RHA was −6.9 ± 7.4 Gt between 2004(Matsuo and Heki, 2013 and that thinning rates increased to −0.40 ± 0.09 m a −1 between 2012/13 and 2014, compared to the long-term average of −0.23 ± 0.04 m a −1 (1952 and 2014) (Melkonian et al, 2016).…”

Spring–summer albedo variations of Antarctic sea ice from 1982 to 2009

“…Sea ice is an interface between the ocean surface and the atmosphere, and it greatly inhibits heat and vapour exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere and changes the radiation budget and energy balance on the ocean surface (Parish 1992, Massom et al 1998, Worby and Comiso 2004. Sea ice albedo is a factor that strongly affects the Earth's radiation balance and has frequently been emphasized in studies of the global climate (Hall 2004, Lim et al 2012, Zhao et al 2014. In the Polar regions, snow and ice exhibit high reflectance of solar radiation, preventing absorption in the ocean, and minimal solar radiation input is absorbed by the snow and ice (Zhou et al 2007).…”