NSIDC DaaC

Sea Ice Trends and Climatologies from SMMR and SSM/I



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Monthly Climatology of Sea Ice Concentrations from NSIDC

Monthly sea ice concentration data represent mean ice concentration percentages for each month over the entire time period of the NASA Team Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I Passive Microwave Data (January 1979 through December 2007). A threshold of 15 percent concentration is applied to the monthly climatology fields.

Data are in flat binary format, of one-byte integer type. Thus, 97 means 97percent sea ice concentration. For the Northern Hemisphere the grid size is 304 x 448 pixels, and the Southern Hemisphere grid size is 316 x 332 pixels. The file naming convention is mean.apr.1979-2007.n (or .s). Dates represent which years went into the averaging process. Corresponding PNG images of monthly climatologies are also provided.

Data are available via FTP