Inter-comparison of satellite sea ice motion with drifting buoy data

In this study, three low-resolution and three medium-resolution ice motion products were compared to ice-tethered profiler (ITP) global positioning system (GPS) data over a 2 year period. The ice motion products were the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer Earth Observing System (AMSR-E), merged Advanced Scatterometer + Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (ASCAT + SSM/I), advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR), and Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) ice motion data. The results show that the data quality of six satellite products is better than or close to expected values. The error distributions of the satellite ice motion generally have high kurtosis and heavy tails and are not normally distributed. Low-resolution ice motion generally shows large errors in the Fram Strait. AVHRR summer ice motion shows a larger bias, probably affected by inaccurate cloud masking, while the large errors in ASAR ice motion mainly occur due to occasional geolocation errors of near-real-time ASAR images used for ice motion retrieval. Inter-comparison between satellite ice motion products with different time intervals is also discussed.