The Eumetsat Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Applications Facility provides a "reprocessed" data set of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice concentration for 1978-2009. Source data are the SMMR and SSM/I passive microwave brightness temperatures. Three algorithms are utilized: the Technical University of Denmark algorithm is applied to the SSM/I data from 1991 onwards; the Bootstrap and the Bristol algorithms are combined for the SMMR and SSM/I data for 1978-1991. The Bootstrap is said to have lower sensitivity to atmospheric noise in areas of open water (helping to delineate the ice edge), while the Bristol algorithm is applied due to its lower sensitivity to ice surface emissivity variability. In general, atmospheric effects are more pronounced for relatively low ice concentrations. More information is available in the documentation and publications linked below.
Key Strengths:
- Long, daily or every-other-day timeseries of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic
- Uses dynamic tie points adjusted to typical brightness temperatures of ice and open water; this may account for satellite drift and inter-satellite calibration issues
- Corrections are applied for weather effects (water vapor and surface roughness) on the passive microwave signals
Key Limitations:
- Not fully updated to present
- Few publications about it; properties are not widely known
- The weather corrections depend on the ERA-40 and ECMWF operational forecasts and this could possibly introduce non-climatic biases
Years of Record
Formats
Timestep
Data Time Period Extended?
Domain
Spatial Resolution
Ocean or Land
Missing Data Flag
Vertical Levels
Input Data
Suggested Data Citation
EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice Satelitte Application Facility. Global sea ice concentration reprocessing dataset 1978-2009 (v1.1, 2011), [Online]. Norwegian and Danish Meteorological Institutes. Available from http://osisaf.met.no.
Data Access: Please Cite data sources, following the data providers' instructions.
- Andersen, S., R. Tonboe, S. Kern, and H. Schyberg (2006). Improved retrieval of sea ice total concentration from spaceborne passive microwave observations using Numerical Weather Prediction model fields: An intercomparison of nine algorithms.
- Andersen, S., R. Tonboe, L. Kaleschke, G. Heygster, and L. T. Pedersen (2007), Intercomparison of passive microwave sea ice concentration retrievals over the high-concentration Arctic sea ice, J. Geophys. Res., 112, C08004, doi:10.1029/2006JC003543.