L. Zhou, C. Heuzé, and M. Mohrmann (2023), Sea Ice Production in the 2016 and 2017 Maud Rise Polynyas. Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans, vol 128, pp e2022JC019148, doi:10.1029/2022JC019148

Zhou et al. (2022) determined why the Maud Rise Polynyas opened. In this subsequent study, we looked at whether it mattered, i.e. the heat and moisture fluxes and resulting sea ice production within the polynya after it had opened.

The main points are:

• That the sea ice production within the open-ocean polynyas of 2016 and 2017 was of the same order of magnitude than that of the largest coastal polynyas, often dubbed “ice factories”.
• That this was the first study, to the best of our knowledge, where we estimated the heat flux from the ocean to the ice and atmosphere in the Maud Rise polynya region using year-round autonomous profiling floats.
• That all methods to estimate sea ice production are highly sensitive to the choice of parameters / reanalysis data that have to be used instead of inexistent in-situ observations. Or, as usual, that more observations are urgently needed.

Download the full-text here.