Data Announcement
  • Sea ice

User Notice: USNIC Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice Concentration and Climatologies in Gridded Format

It has come to our attention that the fast ice extent area is underestimated in the files between January 2003 and January 2006 from the U.S. National Ice Center Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice Concentration and Climatologies in Gridded Format data set. This is due to processing at NSIDC failing to take into account USNIC’s use of the form variable “CF” to identify fast ice during this period. Unfortunately, these erroneous files were included in the processing for the climatologies; therefore, climatologies that include the years 2003, 2004, 2005 and January 2006 do not represent fast ice well. These data will be reprocessed to include the CF variable, and we will provide an update when this reprocessing is complete.

In addition, the Arctic weekly files for the 04 April 2009 and 09 April 2012 have erroneously extensive fast ice in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Further details on these erroneous data can be found in Appendix B of the user guide.

Data set DOI: https://doi.org/10.7265/46cc-3952