Sea Surface Salinity in the Arctic Ocean - Results from the NASA SASSIE Field Campaign, Calibration-Validation of Satellite Observations, and Data Outreach

The National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) Salinity and Stratification at the Sea Ice Edge (SASSIE) field campaign took place in the Arctic Ocean between August and October of 2022. The scientific aim is to understand the relationship between both haline and thermal stratification and sea-ice advance, and to test the hypothesis that a significant fresh layer at the surface can accelerate the formation of sea ice by limiting convective processes. With the advent of satellite-derived sea surface salinity (SSS) observations from SMOS, Aquarius/SAC-D, and SMAP in the last decade, such observations could provide insights into sea ice formation rates and extent. With the sensitivity of L-Band radiometry for SSS being low at the temperatures prevalent in the Arctic Ocean (-2°C – 5°C) and additional problems with sea ice contamination in the satellite footprint, careful calibration and validation is needed to determine the quality of satellite-derived SSS in this region, particularly near the ice-edge.

Here, we present three components that have resulted from this NASA Field Campaign.

1.) An overview of data gathered is presented, including an unprecedented density of near-surface salinity measurements from diverse platforms. These were measured during a one-month shipboard hydrographic and atmospheric survey in the Beaufort Sea and include continuous observations at radiometric depth (1-2cm) from the salinity snake instrument, more than 3000 high-resolution uCTD profiles, and air-sea flux measurements. Concurrent with the shipborne observations, an airborne campaign to observe ocean salinity, temperature, and other parameters from a low-flying aircraft was performed. Finally, we discuss the deployment and results of autonomous assets, buoys, and floats that were able to observe both the melt season and the sea ice advance. We combine these in situ observations with satellite SSS data to examine the effects of stratification on ocean dynamics in the Beaufort Sea near the sea ice edge and discuss the quality of SSS data in this region.

2.) NASA Physical Oceanography Programs has affirmed its commitment to Open Science and reproducibility of results. For the SASSIE field campaign, we have created a unique web portal that showcases the datasets gathered during the campaign, giving video overviews as well as written summaries of the available data and motivations for their collection. We have also created repositories that contain processing code used in the creation of these datasets, as well as example processing scripts in the form of Jupyter notebooks, which allow end users to execute a live download of datasets from NASA's Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) as well as processing and plotting these data in Python.

3.) We show the active integration of these tools into the salinity pilot mission exploitation platform (Salinity Pi-MEP), operated by the European Space Agency (ESR) in collaboration with NASA. We demonstrate how such an integration leverages access to other datasets, and facilitates calibration-validation efforts for Level-2 and Level-3 satellite data from multiple satellites.