Sea ice. Credit: Hortigüela

Upgrade of OSI SAF Sea Ice Concentration products

 

Sea ice. Credit: Hortigüela
Sea ice. Credit: Hortigüela

OSI SAF NRT L2 and L3 Sea Ice Concentration products will be upgraded on 25 April 2023.

Last Updated

26 January 2023

Published on

26 January 2023

The upgraded products with 'Operational' status are:

  • NRT L2 Sea Ice concentration (OSI-410-a)
  • NRT L3 Sea Ice concentration product from SSMIS (OSI-401-d)
  • NRT L3 Sea Ice concentration product from AMSR-2 (OSI-408-a)

They will start being distributed via EUMETCast on 25 April 2023, replacing the current operational products.

In the meantime, the upgraded products will be available via the OSI SAF FTP, in parallel to the current products.

Access links

OSI-410-a

ftp://osisaf.met.no/archive_test/ice/conc_l2_ssmis
ftp://osisaf.met.no/archive_test/ice/conc_l2_amsr

OSI-401-d

ftp://osisaf.met.no/archive_test/ice/conc_ssmis

OSI-408-a

ftp://osisaf.met.no/archive_test/ice/conc_amsr

Changes introduced

To simplify the use of different sea ice concentration datasets, some changes have been made so the content (variables) of the Level 2 and Level 3 products is equivalent.

Note: There is no change to the file naming convention of L2 and L3 netCDF products, and no change to the file format.

To facilitate the use of the new L2/L3 products, the name of the variables in the netCDF files also remains unchanged, but some of the variables have a different content or have been deprecated. The sea ice concentration retrieval is always given by the ‘ice_conc’ variable. The main difference is that, by using the variables ‘raw_ice_conc_values’ (new) and ‘status_flag’ (changed), it is easier to get the nominal values retrieved by the algorithm and identify the screening tests applied to derive the ‘filtered’ sea ice concentrations (‘ice_conc’).

For a detailed summary of the L2 and L3 variables, please refer to Appendix A of the updated Product User Manual (PUM).

The PUM, together with the new version of the ATBD and the validation report, are available from https://osi-saf.eumetsat.int/documentation/products-documentation

For more information, contact our User Service Helpdesk.