Ice floe dispersion from remote sensing imagery

Sea ice transport directly affects the heat budget and freshwater flux in the Arctic. Quantifying the dispersion regime of free drifting sea ice is thus an important task to understand the Arctic climate system. In this talk, we employ a newly-developed automated sea ice floe detection and tracking algorithm to analyze the dispersion regime of free-drifting ice floes in the east-central coast of Greenland during the spring of 2017. Our ice floe tracker automatically processes Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images to identify ice floes with length scales ranging from 8 to 35 km. From this information, over 1300 Lagrangian ice floe trajectories are retrieved via feature matching. Ocean surface circulation and its variability are then described by quantifying differential kinematic parameters of the free drifting ice floes, such as single particle dispersion. The dispersion regime of these surface tracers is analyzed via computation of Lyapunov exponents and the Okubo-Weiss parameter. We discuss the feasibility of employing our tracking system to better understand small scale sea ice-ocean interactions, in particular in regards to ocean eddies that are evident in MODIS images.