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 with ITP GPS data for the two years of period. The ice motion products include AMSR-E, merged (ASCAT+SSM/I), ASAR, and AVHRR ice motion data. The results show the data quality of six satellite products is better or close to the 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 larger bias, likely 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.