Estimation of Antarctic land-fast sea ice algal biomass and snow thickness from under-ice radiance spectra in two contrasting areas

Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans (2018)

This work examines the relationships between normalized difference indices (NDI) calculated from under‐ice radiance measurements and sea ice algal biomass and snow thickness for Antarctic fast ice.

We analyze measurements along transects at two contrasting Antarctic fast ice sites in terms of platelet ice presence. Snow and ice thickness, and ice salinity and temperature measurements support our measurements.

Analyses show that NDI wavelength pairs near the first chlorophyll a absorption peak explain up to 70% of the total variability in algal biomass. Our new observation‐based algorithms can be used to estimate Antarctic fast ice algal biomass and snow thickness non-invasively.