Antarctic Sea Ice – Page 121

JAXA Sea Ice Extent (Antarctic and Arctic) – Day 105 – 2016

Published on April 14, 2016April 14, 2016 by sunshinehours13 Comments

JAXA is sea ice extent data from Japan (only goes back to 2002).

JAXA Sea Ice Extent (Antarctic and Arctic) – Day 104 – 2016

Published on April 14, 2016April 14, 2016 by sunshinehours12 Comments

If you have been following this blog, you know the NSIDC satellite data has been very bad. Off by millions of sq km.

So I will be posting graphs for sea ice extent using data from JAXA (only goes back to 2002).

Sea Ice Extent (Global Antarctic and Arctic) – Day 103 – 2016

Published on April 13, 2016 by sunshinehours13 Comments

If you have been following this blog, you know the NSIDC satellite data has been very bad. Off by millions of sq km.

As of this morning the data file his missing all data past March 31 2016. And NSIDC posted this:

NSIDC has suspended daily sea ice extent updates until further notice, due to issues with the satellite data used to produce these images. The vertically polarized 37 GHz channel (37V) of the Special Sensor Microwave Imager and Sounder (SSMIS) on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) F-17 satellite that provides passive microwave brightness temperatures is providing spurious data. The 37V channel is one of the inputs to the sea ice retrieval algorithms, so this is resulting in erroneous estimates of sea ice concentration and extent. The problem was initially seen in data for April 5 and all data since then are unreliable, so we have chosen to remove all of April from NSIDC’s archive.

It is unknown at this time if or when the problem with F-17 can be fixed. In the event that the sensor has permanently failed, NSIDC is working to transition to either the DMSP F-18 or possibly the JAXA Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) on the Global Change Observation Mission – Water (GCOM-W) satellite. Transitioning to a different satellite will require a careful calibration against the F-17 data to ensure consistency over the long-term time series. While this transition is of high priority, NSIDC has no firm timeline on when it will be able to resume providing the sea ice time series. For background information on the challenges of using data in near-real-time, see the ASINA FAQ, “Do your data undergo quality control?”