Arctic sea ice freeboard and thickness from data of the European radar altimeter CryoSat-2 is generated by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in the winter month (October-April). The resulting data products are publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Please read the documentation below for data access and formats.
Disclaimer
This service does not intent to be an operational data dissimination service. Interruptions of data provision might occur at any time. We stress the fact that the interpretation of CryoSat-2 radar signals over sea ice and the uncertainties of freeboard retrieval and conversion into sea ice thickness are still an active field of research. This product shall therefore be used as a tool for the scientific community to enable further development of sea ice thickness retrieval algorithms from radar altimetry.
It is however our aim, to regurlary revise and improve the sea-ice processing chain for CryoSat-2 data and provide incremental update at the start of each Arctic winter season in October.
We encourage users to give feedback (info(at)meereisportal.de) for further improvements of the AWI CryoSat-2 sea ice product.
Data Content & Format
Distributed data processing levels are the daily trajectory summary (l2p) and weekly/monthly gridded data (l3c). The content of products based on the near-real time and reprocessed input version are identical and marked by the timeliness tag in the filename and global attributes of the netCDF files.
Version History
Sea ice products are continuously updated to include scientific and technical improvements. We aim for a yearly update cycle for the AWI CryoSat-2 sea-ice data, which is implemented at the start of the Arctic winter season on Oct. 1st. An update of the algorithm includes a re-processing of the full CryoSat-2 data record. Each update contains algorithm evolutions (changes of the processing evolutions) and system evolutions (changes of the code or input data sets).
Acknowledgements
Cryosat-2 Level-1 data is courtesy of the European Space Agency.
ESA CryoSat website
ESA CryoSat-2 Wiki
Sea ice concentration and type auxiliary data is courtesy of the Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI-SAF)
Global mean sea surface products (DTU15/DTU18) is courtesy of the Danish National Space Institute (DTU Space)