Sea ice and snow thickness from SIMBA buoy experiments

Snow depth and ice thickness in the Arctic Ocean directly result from air-sea ice-ocean interaction and their observational data are essential components of the iAOS. During INTAROS, an innovative and cost-cutting design thermistor string-based snow and ice mass balance apparatus (SIMBA) has been largely deployed in the Arctic Ocean to measure time series of high-resolution vertical temperature profiles through air-snow-sea ice-ocean, and snow depth and ice thickness are derived from SIMBA temperatures.

This document, Deliverable 6.21 - Sea ice and snow thickness from SIMBA buoy experiments summarizes the SIMBA deployment during the INTAROS period. The SIMBA data characteristics and how to derive snow depth and ice thickness from temperature are described. The results from manual analyses and automatic algorithms are compared to each other. We have summarized a few process studies using SIMBA data. The data provided by SIMBA experiments are not only valuable for remote sensing applications but also important to better understand air-sea ice-ocean interactions as well as for process modelling studies. The accessibility to data and repositories of SIMBA data is concluded.

The further exploitation of SIMBA observation as well as how it can possibly be used as a component of the sustainable iAOS are discussed. The document is intended to provide a summary of SIMBA operation in the high-Arctic regions and how the SIMBA data can be used for scientific research and for future operation service and sea ice management.