SMOS & CryoSat-2 Sea Ice Data Product Processing and Dissemination Service (CS2SMOS-PDS)

The dissemination through ESA's Earth Online is running. The most recent data from October 17th show no major data gaps in the sea ice area. You can access data using the SMOS L3 catalogue tree view

Comparison of SMOS ice thickness extent with NSIDC sea ice index

An analysis of the first data from the Arctic freezing season shows that SMOS ice extent is lower than in the previous two years. The graph shows the SMOS ice extent for October 15 and 16, an average of two days. The data looks reasonable and is also consistent with the NSIDC sea ice extent. 

Please note that missing data is filled with the average of all previous years. The gap filling was in particular necessary for the beginning of the time series for the 2010/2011 season with persistent RFI sources in the Greenland Sea (see Kaleschke and Tian-Kunze, 2021).

October 2023: RFI problems in Russian Arctic

The animation shows the SMOS sea ice thickness product in the first days of October. Data gaps (dark gray) occur primarily over the Russian parts of the Arctic Ocean. Such persistent RFI problems did not occur since the season 2010/2011.

Further analysis is required to evaluate whether it is possible to reduce data loss while maintaining data quality through improved (relaxed) RFI filtering techniques.

For more information on RFI see https://rfi.smos.eo.esa.int/

References 

L. Kaleschke and X. Tian-Kunze, "SMOS Sea Ice Thickness Data Product Quality Control by Comparison with the Regional Sea Ice Extent," 2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS, Brussels, Belgium, 2021, pp. 1110-1113, doi: 10.1109/IGARSS47720.2021.9553630.

Operational processing and dissemination of L3 SMOS sea ice thickness product has been resumed for the winter season of 2023/24 since 15 October 2023.

Operational processing and dissemination of L3 and L4 sea ice thickness products in the Arctic for the 2022/23 winter season ended on 15 April, 2023. Reprocessing of L4 CS2SMOS product (r product) will continue until end of May.

L3 SMOS Sea Ice Thickness data processing is resumed since 9 December. The missing L3 SMOS data have been reprocessed. From 12 December on the operational L4 CS2SMOS SIT product is no longer degraded.

L3 SMOS Sea Ice Thickness processing is interrupted since 2 December due to missing JRA55 reanalysis data, which is an auxiliary input data for the SMOS SIT production. Accordingly L4 CS2SMOS production is degraded with less inputs from L3 SMOS products. 

Sea Ice Concentration data from OSI-SAF is (OSI-401-b) is currently not available due to missing DMSP SSMIS Level-1 input data:

https://osi-saf.eumetsat.int/community/list-of-service-messages

Daily sea ice concentration data from OSI-401-b is critical input to the CryoSat-2 sea ice product and data from the following dates is (currently) missing:

• 09 Nov 2022 CryoSat-2 l2p

The production of operational CryoSat-2/SMOS sea ice thickness data continues, but with less input data from CryoSat-2.

Operational processing and dissemination of L4 merged CryoSat-2/SMOS sea ice thickness product has been resumed for the winter season of 2022/23 since 15 October 2022.

The new algorithm version is v205 and a full mission reprocessing is available.

Operational processing and dissemination of L3 SMOS sea ice thickness product has been resumed for the winter season of 2022/23 since 15 October 2022.

The CryoSat-2/SMOS sea ice thickness file for the observation period from April 9th to April 15th, 2022 has been generated, because there is no SMOS sea ice thickness data after April 15. The generation of CS2SMOS data will resume in late October 2022.

Access to recent CryoSat-2 science data via ftp has resumed (ESA announcement). Most recent CryoSat-2/SMOS reprocessed data is still impacted by data gap and will be reprocessed shortly.

Problems with AWI HPC systems have been solved and missing CryoSat-2/SMOS L4 data have been reprocessed.

The processing of Level 4 merged CryoSat-2/SMOS sea ice thickness data is currently interrupted due to a problem with the AWI HPC system. The processing of Level 3 SMOS sea ice thickness data remains unaffected. 

The CryoSat-2 near real-time data service by ESA has resumed. The production of near real-time merged CryoSat-2/SMOS sea ice thickness data continues with a short period of data degradation due to the resulting gap of CryoSat-2 data between Dec 16 and Dec 20, 2021.