The main objective of SPICES is to develop new methods to retrieve sea ice parameters from existing (and imminent) satellite sensors to provide enhanced products for polar operators and prediction systems, specifically addressing extreme and unexpected conditions.
SPICES is in close cooperation with the ESA CCI project, which aims for most consistent time series of sea ice climate variables, while SPICES aims for increased temporal and spatial resolution with best performance on most recent data.
The main objectives in SPICES also represent the different work packages of the project :
1. Establish a dataset of snow and ice measurements.
2. Improve sea ice classification based on Synthetic Aperture Radar, scatterometers and passive microwave sensors.
3. Produce and validate sea ice classification methods from radar altimeter data.
4. Develop an optimal estimation tool for combining data from many satellite instruments in deriving ice and snow parameters.
5. Improve the detection of thin ice thickness.
6. Advance methods to produce freeboard and sea ice thickness profiles from radar altimeter data.
7. Improved detection of summer sea ice properties.
8. Multi-sensor derivation of the sea ice thickness distribution.
9. Exploitation of improved and novel sea ice information for the initialization and evaluation of weekly-to-seasonal probabilistic sea ice forecasting systems.
Our section is strongly involved in four scientific work packages (WP):
WP1: Colocation of snow and sea ice data: Compilation and provision of in-situ (new and archive) data from manual, airborne, and autonomous measurements:
WP5: Characterization of summertime sea ice cover
WP6: Mapping of thin ice data
WP7 (lead of this WP): Sea ice thickness profiles and thickness distributions