Aqua/AMSR-E L2 AMSR2 Format Sea Ice Concentration

However, the AMSR-E reached its limit to maintain the antenna rotation speed necessary for slow rotation mode and it automatically halted its observation and rotation on December 4, 2015.This product includes Sea Ice Concentration (SIC). The technique uses data from the 6 GHz and 37 GHz channels at vertical polarization to obtain an initial estimate of sea ice concentration and ice temperature. The derived ice temperature is then utilized to estimate the emissivity for the corresponding observations at all the other channels.

Ice concentrations are derived mainly from 37 GHz and 19 GHz channels, as in the Bootstrap technique, but makes use of emissivity instead of brightness temperatures to minimizes errors associated with spatial changes in sea ice temperatures.The ice temperature is in the end normalized using the derived ice concentration value, for it to represent temperature only of the sea ice part of the satellite observational area.

The physical quantity unit is %.Also, the quality flag for each observation point (Pixel Data Quality) is stored.The provided format is HDF5. Spatial resolution is 10 km. The current version of the product is "Version 8".

The generation unit is scene (defined as a half orbit).