Arctic Sea Ice State Estimation From Thermodynamic PDE Model

Abstract: Recent rapid loss of the Arctic sea ice motivates the study of the Arctic sea ice thickness. Global climate model that describes the ice's thickness evolution requires an accurate spatial temperature profile of the Arctic sea ice. However, measuring the complete temperature profile is not feasible within and throughout the Arctic icecap. Instead, measuring the ice's thickness is doable with the acquisition of data from submarine and satellite devices. In this paper, we develop a backstepping observer algorithm to estimate the temperature profile for the Arctic sea ice model via available measurements of sea ice thickness and sea ice surface temperature. The observer is designed in a rigorous manner to drive the temperature profile estimation error to zero, for a salinity-free sea ice model. Moreover, the proposed observer is used to estimate the temperature profile of the original sea ice model with salinity via numerical simulation. In comparison with the straightforward open-loop algorithm, the simulation results illustrate that our observer design achieves ten times faster convergence of the estimated temperature.