Hello all, we’re excited to share news that U.S. National Ice Center Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice Charts in SIGRID-3 Format are now available from @. These ice charts that have information on total sea ice concentration as well as concentration by stage of development, and ice form. The charts are produced by the U.S. National Ice Center, with a temporal coverage of 2003 to present, and for most of the record the charts are weekly in frequency.
SIGRID-3 is a vector format for ice chart data. Researchers who do not need the detail contained in the SIGRID-3 format may wish to use U.S. National Ice Center Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice Concentration and Climatologies in Gridded Format. This uses the SIGRID-3 files to make netCDF, geoTIFF, and shapefile format weekly charts of total ice concentration, multiyear ice concentration, first-year ice concentration, thin ice concentration, and fast ice extent. In addition, there are period-of-record, 5-year, and 10-year climatological averages.
The USNIC SIGRID-3 charts join the Canadian Ice Service Arctic Regional Sea Ice Charts in SIGRID-3 Format data. These operational ice chart series hold information about sea ice regimes that is not available elsewhere.
We hope these data will find wide use for researching the changing composition of ice types in a region, for validating satellite data algorithms, for assessing historical risk to ice operations for ships under the terms of the Polar Code, and more.
Florence Fetterer for @