Variability in Antarctic sea ice from 1998-2017

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1 College of Information Science and Engineering, Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China
2 Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27121v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Environmental Impacts, Spatial and Geographic Information Science
Keywords
first year ice, total sea ice, Antarctic, sea ice melt duration, multiyear ice
Copyright
© 2018 Wu et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Wu Z, Wang X. 2018. Variability in Antarctic sea ice from 1998-2017. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27121v1

Abstract

This study was based on the daily sea ice concentration data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, CO, USA) from 1998 to 2017. The Antarctic sea ice was analysed from the total sea ice area (SIA), first year ice area, first year ice melt duration, and multiyear ice area. On a temporal scale, the changes in sea ice parameters were studied over the whole 20 years and for two 10-year periods. The results showed that the total SIA increased by 0.0083×106 km2 yr-1 (+2.07% dec-1) between 1998 and 2017. However, the total SIA in the two 10-year periods showed opposite trends, in which the total SIA increased by 0.026×106 km2 yr-1 between 1998 and 2007 and decreased by 0.0707×106 km2 yr-1 from 2008 to 2017. The first year ice area increased by 0.0059×106 km2 yr-1 and the melt duration decreased by 0.0908 days yr-1 between 1998 and 2017. The multiyear ice area increased by 0.0154×106 km2 yr-1 from 1998 to 2017, and the increase in the last 10 years was about 12.1% more than that in the first 10 years. On a spatial scale, the Entire Antarctica was divided into two areas, namely West Antarctica (WA) and East Antarctica (EA), according to the spatial change rate of sea ice concentration. The results showed that WA had clear warming in recent years; the total sea ice and multiyear ice areas showed a decreasing trend; multiyear ice area sharply decreased and reached the lowest value in 2017, and accounted for only about 10.1% of the 20-year average. However, the total SIA and multiyear ice area all showed an increased trend in EA, in which the multiyear ice area increased by 0.0478×106 km2 yr-1. Therefore, Antarctic sea ice presented an increasing trend, but there were different trends in WA and EA. Different sea ice parameters in WA and EA showed an opposite trend from 1998 to 2007. However, the total SIA, first year ice area, and multiyear ice area all showed a decreasing trend from 2008-2017, especially the total sea ice and first year ice, which changed almost the same in 2014-2017. In summary, although the Antarctic sea ice has increased slightly over time, it has shown a decreasing trend in recent years.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.