An all-weather microwave-based AI retrieval of pan-Arctic melt pond fraction

Caveats

• Preprint; not yet peer reviewed.

Melt pond fraction (MPF) is a key variable governing Arctic sea ice albedo and seasonal sea ice predictability, yet existing pan-Arctic MPF products rely almost exclusively on optical sensors, limiting availability under cloud cover and seasonal darkness. This study presents PRISM-MPF, the first pan-Arctic, multi-year, all-weather MPF dataset, derived from PRISM (Polar Retrievals through Intelligent Sensor Merging), a machine learning framework fusing multi-source microwave observations with auxiliary thermal and spatiotemporal information to complement optical products. An XGBoost model was trained on eight melt seasons (2017-2025, excluding 2019) using Sentinel-1 C-band SAR backscatter, AMSR2 brightness temperatures and sea ice concentration, NOAA OISST sea surface temperature, and spatiotemporal descriptors (date and grid position). Three experiments assessed baseline skill and feature importance, independent sensor-group contributions (including CryoSat-2 radar freeboard), and regional specialisation, all under Leave-One-Year-Out (LOYO) cross-validation on unseen melt seasons. The baseline retrieval achieved a per-season mean R2=0.468 and RMSE=0.080 (pooled over 1,066,808 pixels: R2=0.532, RMSE=0.077), comparable to prior regional microwave-based studies, now at pan-Arctic, multi-year scale. Removing spatiotemporal features or C-band SAR reduced skill comparably (Delta R2=+0.089 and +0.085), whereas physical sensors alone outperformed spatiotemporal features alone (R2=0.375 vs 0.261), showing the two groups are complementary. Regional specialisation offered no advantage over a single pan-Arctic retrieval. This framework establishes a reproducible foundation for all-weather Arctic MPF monitoring, extensible to new sensors, longer records, and reference products.

Sara Aparício, Simon Driscoll, Mark R. Drinkwater, Daniela Flocco

Leverage2 / 5

Reusable within one subfield (a technique, dataset, or protocol a few groups will adopt).

16% of this desk’s rubric

Magnitude3 / 5

Large gain: roughly 2x, or a clear new state of the art on a hard, unsaturated problem.

20% of this desk’s rubric

Evidence3 / 5

Solid: multiple benchmarks or cohorts, ablations, fair baselines, released code or data.

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Novelty2 / 5

A new combination of known ideas.

10% of this desk’s rubric

Trajectory2 / 5

Some room to improve with obvious engineering.

14% of this desk’s rubric

Stakes3 / 5

Meaningful benefit to many people within a few years.

20% of this desk’s rubric

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• Reviewed by heuristic-v10 on Nov 3, 2026, 07:29 UTC. Paper type: empirical.
• Categories: physics.ao-ph
• BRIEF, No.8 in the Climate & Energy edition of November 3, 2026.