AMSR-E sea ice concentration
News: New ASI AMSR-E dataset available (v5.6i)
May 2010: The ASI AMSR-E sea ice concentration dataset has been reprocessed for the complete AMSR-E timeseries starting in 2002. The new version (v5.6i) applies updated AMSR-E brightness temperatures from NSIDC, a new Arctic land mask, and corrects an error with the maximum ice extent mask. For more details see the AMSRE-ASI-Info.txt file.
Sea ice concentration maps / time series
Sea ice concentration data calculated with the ARTIST sea ice (ASI) concentration algorithm (pdf) using AMSR-E 89 GHz brightness temperatures.
An archive with AMSR-E ASI sea ice concentration data for the Arctic and Antarctic can be found on our ftp server.
The archive is updated approximately in the middle of every month with the data of the month before. It contains a consistent time series of sea ice concentrations on a 6.25 km grid since the start of operation of AMSR-E on 18 June 2002. News, information and release notes of the dataset can be found in the AMSRE-ASI-Info.txt file.
Daily updated AMSR-E sea ice concentration maps:
Latest sea ice maps
Sea ice concentration maps of the Arctic and Arctic using the latest AMSR-E data from today and yesterday. The maps are updated with the latest data several times per day. Thus data gaps occur until one day is completed. The used tie-points are different from the archived data.
More and also regional up-to-date sea ice maps can be found on the sea ice web page of the University of Bremen.
Arctic and Antarctic total sea ice area and extent (left) and area anomalies (right):
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| Sea ice area (black) and extent (red) for the Arctic and Antarctic for the complete archived ASI AMSR-E time series. The "hole" at the North Pole is assumed to be 100% ice covered. | Sea ice area anomalies for the Arctic (red) and Antarcic (blue) for the complete AMSR-E time series. Anomalies are calculated daily with respect to the mean of the accordant days for all years of the time series. |
Minimum sea ice extent
2009
| 2007
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2006  | ||
2005  | ||
| Map of the 2009 minimum sea ice extent, which occurred on 11 September 2009. For comparison also the record minimum sea ice extent of September 2007 and the mean September sea ice extents of the five years 2002 to 2006 and the five years 1979 to 1983 are shown as green, red, and orange contours, respectively. The 2009 minimum sea ice extent is after 2007 and 2008 the third lowest in the more than 35 year long satellite data time series. | Map of the 2007 minimum sea ice extent, which occurred on 17 September 2007 and was the lowest extent in the 35 year long satellite observation history. For comparison the mean September sea ice extents of the five years 2002 to 2006 and the five years 1979 to 1983 are marked as red and orange contours, respectively. | Maps of the 2008, 2006 and 2005 minimum sea ice extents with contours of mean Sep. 2002-2006 and 1979-1983 ice extent (2005 contours: 2002-2005 and 1979-1982,). The 2008 map shows additionally the 2007 sea ice minimum as green contour. |
Animations
Animation of Arctic, Antarctic, and combined Arctic-Antarctic sea ice concentration using the ARTIST sea ice (ASI) algorithm for AMSR-E radiometer data (Jun 2002 to Sep 2007; mpeg1 format; 55 MB, 55 MB, and 83 MB, respectively). The animation ends in 2007 with the all time minimum sea ice coverage during the 35 years of satellite observations.
Citation Information
If you use data or plots from this website please cite the data accordingly: "University of Hamburg, Institute of Oceanography, Gunnar Spreen and Lars Kaleschke" and/or cite our article "Spreen, G., L. Kaleschke, and G. Heygster (2008), Sea ice remote sensing using AMSR-E 89-GHz channels, J. Geophys. Res., 113, C02S03, doi:10.1029/2005JC003384."
If you need a complete citation for the data you may use: Spreen, G., and L. Kaleschke (2008), "AMSR-E ASI 6.25 km Sea Ice Concentration Data, V5.4", Institute of Oceanography, University of Hamburg, Germany, digital media (ftp-projects.zmaw.de/seaice/).
The year and data version should fit the used data, i.e. the year when the data was obtained. The data version can be found at the bottom of the image plots.