Operational processing and dissemination of the L4 CryoSat-2/SMOS near real-time sea ice thickness product has been resumed for the winter season of 2023/24 with data since 15 October 2023. See CryoSat-SMOS Merged Sea Ice Thickness for updates of version 206.
First sea ice thickness data from the L4 CryoSat-2/SMOS v206 near real-time product (Oct 15 - Oct 21, 2023)
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.