Sea Ice#

Basic Plotting#

Learning Goals#

  • Making polar projection plots

  • Understanding sea ice variables such as concentration and thickness

  • Masking and area averaging

  • Computing total sea ice area or volume

Exercise 1: Making polar projection plots of sea ice concentration.#

Here we will use some custom python tools to produce a polar projection plot of sea ice concentration. Some things to try include changing the colormap, plotting sea ice thickness instead of concentration, changing hemispheres.

Exercise 2: Compute total sea ice area and plot versus time.#

Here will we learn how to compute the total sea ice area for the northern hemisphere. Then plot this versus time. Some exercises will be plotting the monthly mean sea ice area, plotting just September or March mean sea ice area, computing sea ice volume and plotting that.

Advanced Plotting#

Learning Goals#

  • Using sea ice thickness distribution (ITD) category information

  • Using sea ice tracers

  • Remapping sea ice fields.

Exercise 1: Plot per-category ice area#

Here you will plot a field that uses the subgridscale ice thickness distribution (ITD) categories.

Exercise 2: Plot per-category snow thickness#

Here is another example of an ITD related field, the snow thickness. Actual snow thickness is derived from the snow volume (per unit area).

Exercise 4: Remapping or regridding sea ice fields#

The ocean and sea ice grids are different in that the North Pole is moved into land. In this exercise you will learn how to “remap” or “regrid” a sea ice field onto a standard one degree by one degree grid.