Recent changes with the satellite sea ice data in the Climate Data Store

Announcements C3S - Announcements
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Some changes were recently made to the presentation and content of satellite sea ice data in the Climate Data Store (CDS).

Up until 20/12/2020, a single CDS entry titled “Sea ice monthly and daily gridded data from 1978 to present derived from satellite sensors” provided access to four different sea ice products, namely Sea Ice Concentration, Sea Ice Thickness, Sea Ice Edge, and Sea Ice Type. Since 21/12/2020, to take into account the differences between these products and improve their description and accessibility in the CDS, these products have been provided in three new CDS entries:

The new entry for Sea Ice Concentration provides access to two new Sea Ice Concentration products:

  • The Global Sea Ice Concentration Climate Data Record Version 2 produced by the EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF) based on SMMR, SSM/I, and SSMIS sensors and spanning January 1979 to present. This version supersedes Version 1 previously available in the CDS and whose production ended in January 2020.
  • The Global Sea Ice Concentration Climate Data Record Version 2.1 produced by the ESA Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI) project based on the AMSR-E and AMSR2 sensors and spanning June 2002 to May 2017.

The previous satellite sea ice entry has been marked as deprecated, which means that it is no longer searchable in the CDS and its products will no longer be updated. However, it will remain accessible to users for about one year before being permanently removed from the CDS.

We invite users downloading satellite sea ice data programmatically using the CDS API service or the CDS Toolbox to update their scripts as soon as possible. Please note that while the data from the deprecated satellite sea ice entry will remain accessible via the CDS API until the dataset is removed from the CDS, no support will be provided to users of the deprecated satellite sea ice data.

Finally, for Sea Ice Thickness, the publication of the new CDS entry coincided with a bug fix meant to correct empty fields (only missing data) for the status_flag and quality_flag variables in some NetCDF files. This issue only affected the data covering the period from October 2019 to October 2020 (eight files in total). We invite users who downloaded these data between November 2019 and December 2020 to re-download the files.

For any enquiries or feedback regarding the above, please contact the Copernicus Support team at ECMWF.

Regards,

C3S Helpdesk at ECMWF