Blog from October, 2020

The production of operational sea-ice thickness information from near real-time CryoSat-2 data has resumed:

Please note that gaps in the NRT input data (see previous blog post) still exist. The production team is in contact with ESA and the investigation is ongoing.

Reprocessed CryoSat-2 data from October will start to become available in the beginning of November.

Algorithm Updates

The AWI CryoSat-2 sea-ice product is updated annually and the new version is reprocessed every year in fall and operationally generated from October on. The product version from October 2020 on is v2.3 and it contains the following changes compared to v2.2:

Auxiliary Data

• Switched C3S sea-ice concentration (interim) climate data record from v1.2 to v2.0
• Reverted mean sea surface from DTU18 to DTU15
• Optimized sea-ice type information near coasts and in the Canadian Archipelago

Algorithm

• Updated computation of wavespeed correction in the snow layer according to Mallett et al., 2020
• Used hemisphere-wide snow density values according to Mallett et al., 2020
• Snow depth and density values are updated daily instead of monthly to avoid freeboard and thickness discontinuities at a change of month
• Optimizations in the estimation of along-track sea-level anomaly

Product format and content

• sea level anomaly is now named sea_level_anomaly instead of sea_surface_height_anomaly

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue that resulted in loss of data for the SARin radar mode (most severe in the Canadian Archipelago)

An update of the Product User guide will be published shortly.

Download Location

The new version of the AWI CryoSat-2 sea ice product can be accessed shortly via the ftp server of the Alfred Wegener Institute:

ftp://ftp.awi.de/sea_ice/product/cryosat2/v2p3/nh/

After release, older version are considered deprecated and public access is removed.