Satellites can now measure the thickness of Arctic sea ice in the summer months for the first time, thanks to a new study involving UCL researchers and CPOM associates, Professor Julienne Stroeve and Dr Michel Tsamados.
Until now, satellites could only measure sea ice thickness between October and March, when the ice and snow are cold and dry. In the warmer months, melt ponds on top of the ice floes confused the instruments, which could not be used to distinguish between melted ice on an ice floe and the ocean.
In the new study, published in the journal Nature, researchers used an artificial intelligence technique to correct this problem, in which an algorithm was trained on thousands of simulations of satellite data to reliably distinguish between melt ponds and the ocean.
Click here to view the UCL full article.
Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Source: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.