The Sea Ice Radar Altimetry project of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) is based on satellite radar altimetry data to investigate the sea ice mass balance and related processes to understand Arctic Change.
SIRAL Blog
News and updates to CryoSat-2 sea ice products:
We started to work on online documentation of AWI sea ice radar altimetry (siral) data products. More content soon.
Arctic sea ice thickness information has been updated with NRT data for December 2017 and reprocessed data for November 2017. Daily, weekly and monthly products are available here: Reprocessed ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/, Near-real time ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/Latest
CryoSat-2 NRT Level-1b input data was not available for December 16-17 on the ESA server.…
Arctic sea ice thickness information has been updated with NRT data for January 2018 and reprocessed data for December 2017. Daily, weekly and monthly products are available here: Reprocessed ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/, Near-real time ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/Latest
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A major low pressure system passed through the Barents Sea on February 5, 2018 transporting significant amount of warm air masses to the central Arctic (overview e.g. Arctic News http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2018/02/north-pole-forecast-to-be-above-freezing-on-feb-5-2018.html, Arctic Sea Ice Blog http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2018/02/piomas-february-2018.html). It also generated high surface waves in the sea-ice free area north of Spitsbergen.…
Arctic sea ice thickness information has been updated with NRT data for February 2018 and reprocessed data for January 2018. Daily, weekly and monthly products are available here: Reprocessed ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/, Near-real time ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/Latest
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The detection of leads to estimate local sea surface height is one crucial step for remote sensing of sea ice thickness with radar altimetry. Algorithms that classify individual radar echoes into the category sea ice, lead, or mixed must return reliable results in all sea ice conditions. To verify the surface type classification algorithms, we use other observational sources as the Sea-ice lead detection in the Arctic from MODIS satellite imagery, 2013-2016 http://meteo.uni-trier.de/arcleads.…
Arctic sea ice thickness information has been updated with NRT data for March 2018 and reprocessed data for February 2018. Daily, weekly and monthly products are available here: Reprocessed ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/, Near-real time ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/Latest
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One useful method to evaluate sea ice thickness information from remote sensing and numerical models is to compare monthly anomalies. This parameter is defined as the difference of one particular month to the mean monthly thickness fields of other month in the data record. Monthly anomalies are therefore sensitive to processes that cause sea ice thickness changes and can be compared to other sources which may have a systematic thickness bias to the reference thickness field.…
The production of the sea ice thickness climate data record of the ESA Climate Change Initiative http://esa-cci.nersc.no/ (CCI) has been finalized. The files are currently being registered with their respective doi's and official dissimination will commence shortly.…
Arctic sea ice thickness information has been updated with NRT data for April 2018 and reprocessed data for March 2018. Daily, weekly and monthly products are available here: Reprocessed ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/, Near-real time ftp://altim:altim@data.meereisportal.de/altim/sea_ice/product/north/cryosat2/cs2awi-v2.0/Latest
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With monthly mean thickness in April 2018, the 8th Arctic winter season of 2017/2018 is now complete.
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All monthly mean CryoSat-2 Arctic sea ice thickness fields
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All monthly mean CryoSat-2 Arctic sea ice thickness anomaly fields
The latest results from CryoSat show that the latest extrema in winter sea ice maximum extent are not necessarily accompanied by a lower mean sea ice thickness of the remaining ice. One factor certainly is that sea ice thickness is a product of thermodynamic ice growth and the acummulated dynamic forces throughout the winter. As a first step in the investigation to what extent dynamic forces have played a role in the last winter,…
CryoSat-2 has now finished its 9th winter from October to April of Arctic sea ice thickness observations. No sea-ice thickness production is now paused for the month of May through September since the snow is warming and will soon start to melt. The impact of snow melt on the sea-ice thickness retrieval is poorly understood and the production will resume in October 2019 with the next version of CryoSat-2 data.
In resume,…
The generation of sea-ice thickness from CryoSat-2 will resume in October 2019 with an update of the retrieval algorithm and product content. The changes are listed below:
Altimeter Input Data
CryoSat-2 baseline-D data as primary altimeter data since April 28, 2019. NOTE: In v2.2 the reprocessed grid products consist of a mix between baseline-C and baseline-D
Auxiliary Data
Use C3S (interim) climate data records of sea ice concentration as auxiliary data for the reprocessed data stream.…
The reprocessed data record for the AWI CryoSat-2 sea ice product (version 2.2) is now available on the AWI ftp ftp://ftp.awi.de/sea_ice/product/cryosat2/v2p2/ (Nov 2010 - April 2019). The previous version is deprecated and has been remove. Updates of the reprocessed data stream will start with a delay of 33 days in early November and with 2 day delay for the near-real time data stream in early October.…