Data Product Summary

for

Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I Passive Microwave Data

File Content:

Daily and monthly flat, binary data files for each polar region.

File Format: 300-byte descriptive header followed by a two-dimensional array of one-byte, unsigned integers.
Projection:

Polar Stereographic projection for North and South Polar grids.

Grid Resolution: 25.0 km
Array:

Northern Hemisphere: 448 rows by 304 columns
Southern Hemisphere: 332 rows by 316 columns

Precision of Value:

Percent Sea Ice Fraction: 0.1%

Scaling factor: Sea ice concentration values are packed into byte format by multiplying the original sea ice concentration floating-point values (ranging from 0.0 to 1.0) by a scaling factor of 250. Thus a sea ice concentration value of 0% (0.0) maps to a byte value of 0 and a sea ice concentration value of 100% (1.0) maps to a value of 250. To revert back to the original range of 0.0 to 1.0, divide the scaled sea ice concentrations by 250.0.
Software:

IDL, Matlab, GIF Viewers