Taking a Second Look: Correcting Sea Ice Forecasts with Sparse Observations

Abstract

Sea ice forecasts are issued several days ahead, allowing errors to accumulate while new, often sparse sea ice concentration (SIC) observations become available. We find that fixed-propagation errors concentrate near structured, high-gradient ice edges, whereas homogeneous interiors require limited propagation, suggesting that propagation distance should be state dependent. We therefore introduce ECHO (Evidence-guided Correction with Heterogeneous prOpagation), where ECHO-Scale adapts propagation distance while preserving correction geometry, and ECHO-Delta learns a bounded residual around fixed propagation. Across all 96 standard evaluation settings spanning diverse priors, observation times, sparsity levels, geometries, and noise conditions, both outperform fixed propagation. ECHO-Delta achieves the best average accuracy, while ECHO-Scale is more robust to geometry shifts. Code is available at https://github.com/yingtian22/TAKING-A-SECOND-LOOK.