Automated Detection and Depth Determination of Melt Ponds on Sea Ice in ICESat-2 ATLAS Data—The Density-Dimension Algorithm for Bifurcating Sea-Ice Reflectors (DDA-Bifurcate-Seaice)

As climate warms and the transition from a perennial to a seasonal Arctic sea-ice cover is imminent, understanding melt ponding is central to understanding changes in the new Arctic. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) has the capacity to provide measurements and monitoring of the onset of melt in the Arctic and on melt progression. Yet ponds are currently not identified on the ICESat-2 standard sea-ice products, in which only a single surface is determined. The objective of this article is to introduce a mathematical algorithm that facilitates automated detection of melt ponds in the ICESat-2 Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) data, retrieval of two surface heights, pond surface and bottom, and measurements of depth and width of melt ponds. With ATLAS, ICESat-2 carries the first spaceborne multibeam micropulse photon-counting laser altimeter system, operating at 532-nm frequency. ATLAS data are recorded as clouds of discrete photon points. The Density-Dimension Algorithm for bifurcating sea-ice reflectors (DDA-bifurcate-seaice) is an autoadaptive algorithm that solves the problem of pond detection near the 0.7-m nominal along-track spacing of ATLAS data, utilizing the radial basis function for calculation of a density field and a threshold function that automatically adapts to changes in the background, apparent surface reflectance, and some instrument effects. The DDA-bifurcate-seaice is applied to large ICESat-2 datasets from the 2019 and 2020 melt seasons in the multiyear Arctic sea-ice region. Results are evaluated by comparison with those from a manually forced algorithm.