Data Description

Atmospheric drag coefficients over Arctic sea ice (spring, 2009-2015): Maps of the neutral atmospheric form drag coefficient from surface feature variability derived from NASA's Operation IceBridge Airborne Topographic Mapper data and extrapolated across the Arctic domain with ASCAT backscatter data. Also included is the total neutral atmospheric drag coefficient, which includes contributions from surface feature variability (as above), but also from floe edges in the marginal ice zone (concentration from the NASA Team algorithm), a constant form drag coefficient over open water and a constant skin drag coefficient.'

References:

Petty, A. A., M. C. Tsamados, N. T. Kurtz (2017), Atmospheric form drag over Arctic sea ice using remotely sensed ice topography observations, J. Geophys. Res. Earth Surf., 122, doi:10.1002/2017JF004209

Petty, A. A., M. C. Tsamados, N. T. Kurtz, S. L. Farrell, T. Newman, J. P. Harbeck, D. L. Feltham, and J. A. Richter-Menge (2016), Characterizing Arctic sea ice topography using high-resolution IceBridge data, The Cryosphere, 10(3), 1161–1179, doi:10.5194/tc-10-1161-2016

Data Format

A single NetCDF file is provided for each annual spring Arctic IceBridge sea ice campaign (2009-). The data has a horizontal resolution of ~4.5 km (the ASCAT-SIR resolution) and is provided on a polar stereographic projection (1530, 1530). The latitude and longitude coordinates are also provided in each NetCDF file. Missing data (e.g. over land) is assigned a value of -999. For questions about the data please contact: Alek Petty, alek.a.petty@nasa.gov.