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Snow has thinned significantly in the Arctic, particularly on sea ice in western waters near Alaska, a new study has found. 

The study led by the University of Washington and NASA, combined data collected by ice buoys and NASA aircraft with historic data from ice floes staffed by Soviet scientists from the late 1950s through the early 1990s. 

"When you stab it into the ground, the basket move up, and it records the distance between the magnet and the end of the probe," said first author Melinda Webster, a UW graduate student in oceanography, in the press release. "You can take a lot of measurements very quickly. It's a pretty big difference from the Soviet field stations."

Findings of the study showed that snowpack has thinned from 14 inches to 9 inches in the western Arctic and from 13 inches to 6 inches in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, west and north of Alaska. 

"Knowing exactly the error between the airborne and the ground measurements, we're able to say with confidence, Yes, the snow is decreasing in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas," said co-author Ignatius Rigor, an oceanographer at the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory.

According to the authors of the study, the reason for the thinner snow might be that surface freeze-up is happening later in the fall so year's heaviest snowfalls, in September and October, mostly fall into the open ocean, the press release added. 

"This confirms and extends the results of that earlier work, showing that we continue to see thinning snow on the Arctic sea ice," added Rigor, who was also a co-author on the earlier paper.

The study has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.