The Sea Ice CCI team is pleased to announce the release of a full reprocessing of the Sea Ice Concentration (SIC) v2.0 ECV. The release provides Climate Data Record (CDR) of SIC over the polar regions, derived from medium resolution passive microwave satellite data of AMSR-E (2002-2011) and AMSR2 (2012-2015). Two new CDRs are made available: • The 25km SIC CDR based on 18.7 GHz and 36.5 GHz imaging channels (http://dx.doi.org/10.5285/c61bfe88-873b-44d8-9b0e-6a0ee884ad95); • The 50km SIC CDR based on 6.9 GHz and 36.5 GHz imaging channels (http://dx.doi.org/10.5285/70f611b0-ba82-48e6-9190-a62cf9f925f2). Please visit the respective landing pages for access to documentation and data. The two SIC CDRs use different imaging channels and therefore they have different characteristics and accuracies. Initial validation work indicates that the 50km CDR has higher accuracy than the 25km CDR across the range of sea ice concentration values, however, it has lower spatial resolution. Compared to similar SIC CDRs available e.g. from EUMETSAT OSI SAF or NSIDC, the SICCI 25km CDR has finer spatial details, especially in the ice edge region due to the finer spatial resolution of the AMSR-E and AMSR2 data used here. These two CDRs were generated in the context of the ESA Climate Change Initiative Programme (ESA CCI) by the Sea_Ice_CCI project (www.esa-seaice-cci.org). The EUMETSAT OSI SAF contributed with access and re-use of part of its processing software and facilities. In parallel, please note that the EUMETSAT OSI SAF is preparing a new version of their global SIC CDR, using some algorithms developed during ESA CCI. The new OSI SAF CDR covers years 1979 to 2015 and is processed from instruments with coarser spatial resolution (SMMR, SSM/I, and SSMIS). Its release will be announced on www.osi-saf.org.

The SIC data sets and other sea ice data sest from the CCI project are also available at Integrated Climate Data Center - ICDC - at University of Hamburg: 

http://icdc.cen.uni-hamburg.de/1/projekte/esa-cci-sea-ice-ecv0.html