Ice Albedo

The first new word I found is Ice albedo. This comes from the two words Ice and albedo.

Albedo is the reflectivity. In simple terms it is the measure of how white something is. It is also a measure of how much light does something absorbs. The albedo scale ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 being perfect absorption (pitch black) and 1 being perfect reflection (As white as white can be).

Talking about ice albedo it ranges from 0.5 to 0.7 which is quite high reflectivity. On the other hand ocean albedo is around 0.06 in other words ocean absorbs most of the visible light. Snow has the albedo of 0.9 therefore it acts as a protecting layer over the sea ice.

When snow melts it creates melting ponds that has the albedo of 0.2 to 0.4 in that case albedo drops to 0.75 when the melting pond deepens the albedo can drop to 0.15

You can do further reading at
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/processes/albedo.html