Observations of Melt Pond Evolution and Sea Ice Albedo

Melt pond formation is widely recognized to be a major driver of sea ice surface albedo during summer, and is therefore important to the surface heat budget of the Arctic Ocean. Unfortunately, detailed melt pond observations are few and scattered in both space and time. Here we present a detailed dataset monitoring melt pond evolution and albedo on seasonal ice at Barrow, AK and compare this dataset with melt pond and albedo observations collected elsewhere in the Arctic on both seasonal and multiyear ice. We correlate the key evolutionary stages in pond coverage to the physical processes which drive them and highlight the differences between the processes occurring on multiyear and seasonal ice. Observed melt pond evolutions are compared with parameterizations currently used to explicitly treat melt ponds in global climate models and observed sea ice albedos are compared to global climate model ice albedo parameterizations which do not handle melt ponds explicitly. Energy calculations are carried out to explore the significance of deviations between models and observations. The results highlight specific areas for future observational work as well as potential model improvements.