On 19 September 2025, the SAGE project organised the full-day online event “Beyond Sea Ice Area: Exploring Alternative Diagnostics for Assessing Polar Climate Change”. The “daybinar” format (09:00-20:00 CEST) was designed to cover all time zones and enabled strong participation from the global cryosphere community. More than 180 participants had registered beforehand, confirming a wide interest from both modelling and observational communities.
The programme combined presentations from SAGE members, ESA, and leading international experts, with topics ranging from sea-ice thickness and fast-ice monitoring to new methods for computing sea-ice age. Antarctic perspectives were also included. The event’s objectives were to review the current state of Essential Climate Variable (ECV) sea-ice products, refine scientific and technical requirements for a new sea-ice age product, and discuss the robustness and relevance of polar climate data in an era of rapid change.
The program of the daybinar was:
- Signe Aaboe (Meteorologisk Institutt, Norway): Overview of the SAGE project
- Sarah Connors (ESA): Overview of the ESA-CCI activities and ECVs under development
- Alex Fraser (AAPP, Tasmania): Large-scale characterisation of sea ice from satellite remote sensing: a focus on fast ice and the marginal ice zone
- Dirk Notz (U. Hamburg, Germany): The one-, two- and three-dimensional nature of global sea ice change
- Jack Landy (UiT, Norway): Recent advances in remotely-sensed sea ice thickness from CryoSat-2, ICESat-2 and SWOT
- Anton Korosov: Computation of sea ice age using Lagrangian advection of a triangular mesh: observational and modelling perspectives
- Richard Davy (NERSC): Making sea ice age comparable across models and observations
- Walt Meier (NSIDC): Sea ice age products at NSIDC: lessons learned.
- Ted Maksym (WHOI, USA): Observing Antarctic sea ice processes with ICESat-2
Interactive discussions and live surveys provided valuable feedback on user needs and requirements. These outcomes will directly feed into the User Requirement Document (URD). The event demonstrated that the sea-ice age product under development in SAGE is timely and relevant, and that there is strong interest in complementary diagnostics beyond sea-ice area and extent. The full-day, multi-time-zone format was well received and may serve as a model for future community engagement. During the daytime blocks( in CEST time), attendance varied from 60 to 80 participants. In the afternoon and evening blocks, which correspond to morning or early afternoon in the Americas, attendance ranged from 20 to 45 participants.
Recordings of the event can be found here:
Contact or questions: François Massonnet (francois.massonnet@uclouvain.be)