SIPN2 Webinars

Presentation Title: Prospects for Improved Regional Predictions of Arctic Sea Ice

Date: Tuesday, 13 July 2021
Time: 9:00 am to 10:00 am (Alaska Daylight Time/ UTC−08:00)

This webinar provided an overview of a newly developed dynamical seasonal prediction system and its performance in predicting regional Arctic sea-ice conditions.

Registration for this webinar was required

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This one-hour webinar started at 9:00 am (Alaska Daylight Time/UTC−08:00) on Tuesday, 13 July 2021.

This webinar was designed for the sea-ice research community and others interested in information about applications of machine learning in sea-ice forecasting. While this was an open event, attendees were advised that the discussions would largely be of a technical nature.

Webinar Abstract:
The rapid decline of Arctic sea ice and the implications for a broad array of stakeholders have spurred a decade of research activity into sea ice predictability and prediction. In this talk, I will introduce a newly developed dynamical seasonal prediction system, GFDL-SPEAR, and assess the performance of this system for regional sea ice predictions. I will discuss the key physical sources of Arctic sea ice predictability, routes to improving sea ice predictions, and fundamental limits on prediction skill. Advancing dynamical Arctic sea ice prediction capabilities will require coordinated efforts between the modeling, observational, and data assimilation communities.

Presenter Bio:
Mitch Bushuk is a research scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, where he works on sea ice predictability and polar climate. He received his PhD in Atmosphere-Ocean Science and Mathematics from New York University in 2015, and his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 2009.

Understanding Stakeholder Information Needs for Sea-Ice Forecasting

This webinar included an overview of stakeholder groups and their information needs, examples of how stakeholder groups deal with sea-ice and relate to sea-ice information, and discussion of how information gathered through stakeholder engagement can be of use to the sea-ice forecasting community. Time for participant questions followed the presentations.

Presentation Slides (PDF - 42.2 MB)

YouTube Livestream

Note: In addition to the Zoom presentation, a free livestream of this webinar was broadcast on YouTube — a facilitator provided support to those participants for submiting written questions to the speakers. There was a delay in the relay from the Zoom presentation to the livestream on YouTube.

This webinar was designed for the sea-ice research community and others interested in information about understanding stakeholder needs for sea-ice forecasting. While this was an open event, attendees were made aware that the discussions would largely be of a technical nature.

Webinar Presenters:

• Hajo Eicken, Director, International Arctic Research Center
• Joseph Little, Experimental Arctic Prediction Initiative, International Arctic Research Center/School of Management
• Zeke Baker, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Oklahoma and National Weather Service-Alaska
• Marta Terrado, Science Communication Specialist, Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Presenter Bios:

Hajo Eicken is Professor of Geophysics and Director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His research focuses on sea ice geophysics, Arctic coastal processes, and their importance for human activities and ecosystems. In Alaska he has helped lead efforts to advance collaborative research with Indigenous knowledge holders and to enhance use of scientific data by Arctic communities and government agencies. For more than a decade, he has worked with colleagues to establish a sea-ice observatory at Utqiaġvik/Pt. Barrow. Other collaborative efforts include his involvement in helping launch the Arctic Sea Ice Outlook and Sea Ice Prediction Network, his co-leadership of the Arctic Observing Summit, and service as Chair of a National Academies Standing Committee on Offshore Science and Assessment.

Joseph Little is Professor of Economics and Director of the Economics Program in the School of Management at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His research interests include Applied microeconomics, environmental economics, and non-market valuation. As a Project Team member with SIPN2, his work draws from an online survey of the Bering Sea fixed gear fleet to evaluate stakeholder preferences for seasonal scale sea-ice prediction.

Zeke Baker is a sociologist whose research uses historical and qualitative methods to understand the development and use of environmental/climate science, especially insofar as climate knowledge is embedded in social relationships of power. He is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the University of Oklahoma Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies and works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Anchorage, Alaska, leading a project that evaluates how different groups use and interpret marine forecasts in the Bering Sea region.

Marta Terrado has an experience of more than 10 years in agriculture, water management and ecosystem services research. She is Science Communication Specialist at BSC’s Earth Science Department, supporting activities on communication, dissemination and user engagement. Working in the co-production of climate services, Marta facilitates knowledge transfer for climate change adaptation at the science-stakeholders interface. She has a PhD in Earth Sciences (University of Barcelona) and a Master’s degree in Geographical Information Systems (Polytechnic University of Catalonia).

ICESat-2 over Sea Ice: Early Results

The webinar focused on one of NASA’s science objectives for the ICESat-2 altimetry mission—to provide observations to quantify changes and to add to previous satellite and airborne records of freeboard, thickness, and sea surface height of the ice-covered Arctic and Southern Oceans (e.g., from ICESat, Operation IceBridge, and CryoSat-2, etc.). ATLAS, a multi-beam photon-counting lidar, the sole instrument on the ICESat-2 observatory, launched in September 2018, provides a rich altimetric dataset of multiple profiles of the ice and ocean surfaces. In this talk, Ron Kwok talked about the capabilities of the multi-beam instrument based on data acquired thus far over the Arctic and Antarctic ice covers. In particular, he showed the precision in the retrieved surface heights over relatively flat surface, the spatial resolution of the height estimates, the time-varying freeboard estimates and sea surface height anomalies over a seasonal cycle, and assessments of the retrievals when compared with airborne and field acquisitions.

Webinar Presenters:
Ron Kwok, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the ICESat-2 Team

Bio:

Ron Kwok is a Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena California. His research interests include the mass and energy balance of the Arctic and Southern Ocean ice cover and the role of the sea ice in global climate, with current focus on the analysis of thickness, small-scale sea ice kinematics, time varying gravity from various spaceborne and airborne instruments.