Under the summer sunlight, the snow covering the ice melts, forming different shapes and sizes of ice pools on the ice. The melting pool caused by the melting of the sea ice surface will reduce the sea ice albedo, which will have a significant impact on the energy balance in the polar region, increasing absorption and thus accelerating the sea ice melting process. Among the factors that affect the sea ice albedo, melting pool is one of the most important and most violent factors. With climate change, the rate of ice melting in summer is also getting faster and faster. The energy balance on the Earth's surface has a significant impact, and the acceleration of ice melting speed may also make the melting pool, an important natural phenomenon, one of the most significant ice surface features during the Arctic sea ice melting season. The albedo of melting pool is between sea water and sea ice. The study of melting pool on ice is also an important part of the study of the rapid change mechanism of Arctic sea ice. Due to the similar microwave signal characteristics between sea ice melting pools and the sea surface, and the significant uncertainty of using microwave data to map melting pool coverage due to factors such as wind speed and sea ice melting, the most reliable remote sensing method for melting pool coverage is to use medium resolution optical remote sensing data (such as MODIS) to map sub pixel melting pool coverage. This dataset includes the use of MODIS data for sub pixel decomposition inversion of Arctic sea ice melting pool coverage and sea ice concentration based on dynamic end element reflectance.

File naming and required software

Store data in Geotiff format.
Naming method: MODIS.Ayyyyddd.MP.tif, where yyyy is the year and ddd is the day of year. The melting pool coverage and sea ice density data in this dataset are retrieved using eight day synthetic spectral reflectance, and the 'do' in the file name is the first day of the eight days.
Each Geotiff file contains two bands. The first band is the absolute coverage of the sea ice melting pond within the pixel (relative to the pixel area), and the second band is the sea ice concentration (the sum of exposed sea ice or snow covered sea ice and the melting pool area, as a proportion of the pixel area).
The original resolution of this data is 500 meters. In order to reduce the amount of data, this dataset has been aggregated at a 3km resolution.
Pixel value of 0-100 is the valid pixel value for melt pond fraction and sea ice concentration. 101 is the ice sheet, 102 is the pixels of land, pixel value of 255 indicates the pixels not included in the retrieval (including the cloud pixels).
The reference paper of this dataset: C. Xiong*; Yan Ren. Arctic Sea Ice Melt Pond Fraction in 2000-2021 derived by Dynamic Pixel Spectral Unmixing of MODIS Images. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Volume 197, March 2023, Pages 181-198. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2023.01.023.

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Cite as:

Xiong, C., Ren, Y., Qiu, Y. (2019). Arctic Sea Ice Melt Pond Fraction from Remote Sensing (2001-2022) v2.0. A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.11888/Glacio.tpdc.270261. CSTR: 18406.11.Glacio.tpdc.270261. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

Related Literatures:

1. C. Xiong*; Yan Ren. Arctic Sea Ice Melt Pond Fraction in 2000-2021 derived by Dynamic Pixel Spectral Unmixing of MODIS Images. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Volume 197, March 2023, Pages 181-198. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2023.01.023( View Details | Bibtex)

Using this data, the data citation is required to be referenced and the related literatures are suggested to be cited.

Support Program

CASEarth:Big Earth Data for Three Poles（grant No. XDA19070000） (No:XDA19000000)

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