Sea Ice Index has been Updated to Final Data through 2020

NOAA@NSIDC is pleased to announce that the Sea Ice Index has been updated from near-real-time data to final data for the time period 01 January 2020 through 31 December 2020. Initially, when the Sea Ice Index is first processed, it uses a near-real-time (NRT) sea ice concentration product as its input. This NRT product can contain missing data and has less quality control procedures applied to it than the final sea ice concentration input product provided by NASA Goddard. However, the final input product often lags behind the present by approximately a year. Using the NRT product allows the Sea Ice Index to provide sea ice extent and concentration data for the previous day. When the final NASA Goddard sea ice concentration product becomes available, NOAA@NSIDC reprocesses the data for that time period so that the more tightly quality controlled and gap filled input data are used for the Sea Ice Index computations. This has been done for the year 2020. In addition, in Sea_Ice_Index_Daily_Extent_G02135_v3.0.xlsx, a new column has been added for the climatological (1981-2010) median to four sheets: NH-Daily-Extent, NH-5-Day-Extent, SH-Daily-Extent, and SH-5-Day-Extent. This has been added to the last column in these sheets and is labeled “1981-2010 median”. Also, the column that was previously named 1981-2010 that contained the climatological mean has been renamed to “1981-2010 mean” to distinguish it from the climatological median column. To access the newest data, please visit the Sea Ice Index landing page. Data Set DOI: https://doi.org/10.7265/N5K072F8