TY - DATA ID - zakharova2016masi T1 - Monthly Arctic sea ice lead fraction in 0.5° x 0.5° resolution from SARAL/Altika altimeter, link to datasets in NetCDF 4 format AU - Zakharova, Elena A AU - Fleury, Sara AU - Guerreiro, Kévin AU - Willmes, Sascha AU - Rémy, Frédérique AU - Kouraev, Alexei V AU - Heinemann, Günther PY - 2016/07/06/ T2 - Supplement to: Zakharova, EA et al. (2015): Sea ice leads detection using SARAL/AltiKa altimeter. Marine Geodesy, 38(sup1), 522-533, https://doi.org/10.1080/01490419.2015.1019655 PB - PANGAEA DO - 10.1594/PANGAEA.862882 UR - https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.862882 N2 - Sea ice leads play an essential role in ocean-ice-atmosphere exchange, in ocean circulation, geochemistry, and in ice dynamics. Their precise detection is crucial for altimetric estimations of sea ice thickness and volume. This study evaluates the performance of the SARAL/AltiKa (Satellite with ARgos and ALtiKa) altimeter to detect leads and to monitor their spatio-temporal dynamics. We show that a pulse peakiness parameter (PP) used to detect leads by Envisat RA-2 and ERS-1,-2 altimeters is not suitable because of saturation of AltiKa return echoes over the leads. The signal saturation results in loss of 6–10% of PP data over sea ice. We propose a different parameter—maximal power of waveform—and define the threshold to discriminate the leads. Our algorithm can be applied from December until May. It detects well the leads of small and medium size from 200 m to 3–4 km. So the combination of the high-resolution altimetric estimates with low-resolution thermal infra-red or radiometric lead fraction products could enhance the capability of remote sensing to monitor sea ice fracturing. ER -