Supplementary material to "Observed modulation of wintertime Western Arctic mixed-phase cloud properties by sea ice conditions, their long-term variabilities and trends"

S1 Climatology of sea ice around the NSA site S1.1 Yearly distribution of sea ice concentrationHere we highlight the conceptual difference between the sea ice conditions within a 50 km radius semi-circle around NSA site and the sea ice conditions utilized to apply the PSG23 method (Sec.2.4).In Fig. S1 the distribution (normalized relative to the mode, i.e. the y-axis represents the most frequent SIC bin when equal to one) of two statistics are shown: the average sea ice concentration corresponding to the whole 50 km semi-circle SIC (red bars), and the average for only SIC within the 3 conical sector (grey bars).Conceptually these two quantities are different, with the SIC not changing with time (AMSR2 standard SIC daily observations), while the second average changes dynamically as a function of maximum z WVT with one minute temporal resolution (same temporal resolution as the synergistic dataset in Sec.2.2).From Fig. S1 it can be seen that for every wintertime the sea ice condition features a multi-modal distributions which is an indicator for variability of the ocean's thermodynamics regime during the period from November to April.A particularly high occurrence of low SIC values (e.g.<40% for red bars in Fig. S1) is observed during the winters 2012/13, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2019/20, 2023/24, 2024/25, which contrasts to other years where SIC barely shows values below 60% as expected for wintertime.On the other hand, the distributions of SIC as a function of maximum z WVT (grey bars in Fig. S1), do not generally resemble the 50 km semi-circle SIC distributions, with most of the occurrences happening above 80%.Contrary to the fact that a randomly selected conical sector of AMSR2 sea ice cells should resemble the SIC distribution, Fig. S1 supports the ability of the WVT