Estimating the uncertainty of sea-ice area and sea-ice extent from satellite retrievals

Abstract. The net Arctic sea-ice area (SIA) can be estimated from the routine monitoring of sea-ice concentration (SIC) by passive microwave measurements from satellites. To be a truly useful metric, for example, of the sensitivity of the Arctic sea-ice cover to global warming, we need, however, reliable estimates of its uncertainty . We here derive this uncertainty by taking spatial and temporal error correlations of the underlying local sea ice concentration products into account. Doing so, we find that the observational uncertainties of both sea-ice area and sea-ice extent (SIE) in 2015 are about 300 000 km² for daily and weekly estimates and 160 000 km² for monthly estimates. This is about half of the spread in estimated sea-ice area from different passive microwave SIC products, showing that random SIC errors play at least as much a role in SIA uncertainties as inter-SIC-product biases. We further show that the trend of SIA in September, which is traditionally the month with least Arctic sea ice is 105 000 km² a^-1 ± 9 000 km² a^-1 for the period from 2002 to 2017. This is the first estimate of a SIA trend with an explicit representation of temporal error correlations.