<div><a href="http://www.canada.com/Scan+Arctic+dispels+melting+gloom+researcher+says/3175785/story.html">http://www.canada.com/Scan+Arctic+dispels+melting+gloom+researcher+says/3175785/story.html</a></div>
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<div>This statement in the article at the website above is misleading, if I understand the science correctly:</div>
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<div>"Part of the problem with ice forecasting is that it based largely on data from satellites. They are good at measuring how large an area is covered by ice, but tell little about its thickness..."</div>
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<div>In fact, satellites can provide data important in measuring Arctic sea ice thickness, which is revealed in the following article, unless I misunderstand (some of the scientific terminology used I do not understand), which discusses data from ICEsat and GRACE satellites, and "ice thickness calculations":</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/GSTM/b4.html">http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/GSTM/b4.html</a></div>
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<p align="justify"><b>Session: B.4.a - Theme: GRACE & the Arctic</b><br><b>Title: <a name="5">Average and interannual dynamic topography from altimetry and the GRACE mean geoid </a></b><br><b>First Author</b>: Ron Kwok<br>
<b>Presenter</b>: Ron Kwok<br><b>Co-Authors</b>: J. Morison</p>
<p align="justify"><b>Abstract</b>: We present our first estimates of the dynamic topography of the Arctic Ocean derived from ICESat and EGM2008. EGM2008 has benefited from the latest GRACE based satellite-only solutions, but is mixed with altimetric estimates to the best of our knowledge. In ICESat processing, we retrieve the ice and sea surface heights (ISH, SSH) by separating the elevation returns from Arctic sea ice and open water. Differencing the ISH with the local SSH gives the sea ice freeboard used in ice thickness calculations. The sparsely sampled SSHs within the ice cover are used to estimate dynamic topography – less than a few percent of the area of ice cover is open water. An accurate geoid is clearly useful in minimizing the uncertainties in our derived quantities at all length scales. We show the contributions of GRACE data in improving the Arctic Gravity Project geoid (ArcGP-geoid) - what looks to be long wavelength anomalies across the Arctic Basin are not longer present. The resulting dynamic topography shows the expected relief but the interpretation of the fields of interannual variability remains. There are residuals in the field that may be due to uncertainties in EGM2008.</p>
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<p align="justify">Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett</p></div>