Aqua/AMSR-E L2 AMSR2 Format Sea Ice Concentration

Product Summary

Aqua/AMSR-E L2 AMSR2 Format Sea Ice Concentration dataset is obtained from the AMSR-E sensor onboard Aqua and produced by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Aqua of NASA was launched on May 4th, 2002 in Sun-synchronous sub-recurrent Orbit. Aqua observes various kinds of physical phenomena related to water and energy circulation from space. Aqua data promoted the research activities for interactions between the atmosphere, oceans and lands, and their effects on climate changes.
AMSR-E scans the Earth's surface by mechanically rotating the antenna and acquires radiance data of the Earth's surface. Each frequency band is monitored by vertical and horizontal polarized wave. It conically scans and keeps an angle of incidence on the earth surface (a nominal of 55 degrees) and accomplishes a swath width of about 1450 km. The AMSR-E reached its limit to maintain the antenna rotation speed necessary for regular observations, and the AMSR-E restarted its observation in slow rotation mode (2 rotations per minute) on December 4, 2012. However, the AMSR-E reached its limit to maintain the antenna rotation speed necessary for slow rotation mode and it automatically halted its observation and rotation on December 4, 2015.
This product includes Sea Ice Concentration (SIC). The technique uses data from the 6 GHz and 37 GHz channels at vertical polarization to obtain an initial estimate of sea ice concentration and ice temperature. The derived ice temperature is then utilized to estimate the emissivity for the corresponding observations at all the other channels. Ice concentrations are derived mainly from 37 GHz and 19 GHz channels, as in the Bootstrap technique, but makes use of emissivity instead of brightness temperatures to minimizes errors associated with spatial changes in sea ice temperatures.
The ice temperature is in the end normalized using the derived ice concentration value, for it to represent temperature only of the sea ice part of the satellite observational area. The physical quantity unit is %.
Also, the quality flag for each observation point (Pixel Data Quality) is stored.
The provided format is HDF5. Spatial resolution is 10 km. The current version of the product is "Version 8". The generation unit is scene (defined as a half orbit).

Platform

Aqua

Sensor

AMSR-E

Coverage

Temporal Coverage

2002-06-01 to 2011-10-05

Spatial Coverage

Bounding Rectangle
(90.0°, -180.0°, -90.0°, 180.0°)

Resolution

10 km

Location

• GLOBAL > GLOBAL OCEAN