This data set provides a Climate Data Record (CDR) of sea ice concentration from passive microwave data. The CDR algorithm output is a rule-based combination of ice concentration estimates from two well-established algorithms: the NASA Team (NT) algorithm (Cavalieri et al. 1984) and NASA Bootstrap (BT) algorithm (Comiso 1986). The CDR is a consistent, daily and monthly time series of sea ice concentrations from 09 July 1987 through the most recent processing for both the north and south polar regions. In addition, three other sea ice concentration products are included with the CDR that extend the sea ice measurements back to 01 November 1978. However, these three products are not included in the official CDR because processing the older data in a way that follows the standards of a CDR is not currently possible. All data are on a 25 km x 25 km grid.

Note: A near-real-time version of this data set also exists to fill the gap between the time that this data set is updated through to the present. The data set is called the Near-Real-Time NOAA/NSIDC Climate Data Record of Passive Microwave Sea Ice Concentration (https://nsidc.org/data/g10016).