Sea-ice maps off Antarctica for the BWZ program

Mati Kahru, mkahru@ucsd.edu

 

·        AMSR-E (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer) data is available from multiple sources. Here I use AMSR-E daily ice coverage maps calculated with the ARTIST Sea Ice (ASI) algorithm and available from the University of Bremen at http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/.

·        Hemispheric ice concentration maps (both Southern and Northern) are available at 6250 m resolution while regional data is available at 3125 m resolution. 

·        The Southern Ocean regional datasets at 3125 m resolution include: AntarcticPeninsula, McMurdo, Neumayer, Polarstern, RossSea, ScotiaSea, WeddellSea. The BWZ area is near the border of the two regions: AntarcticPeninsula  and ScotiaSea.

Detail on how the ice maps were created are below.

 

The following operations were used to create the ice maps:

1. HDF files at 3125 m resolution of the AntarcticPeninsula  and ScotiaSea regions were downloaded with the wget utility.

2. HDF datasets of the both regions were remapped to a common linear projection map and converted to byte with

wam_remap_lla list.txt E:\Projections\BWZ\bwz_linear_320x300_2nm_land.hdf

3. The remapped datasets were patched (composited) together with

wam_composite_2sensors E:\sat\ice\AMSR-E_Bremen\AntarcticPeninsula\bwz_2006\*.hdf E:\sat\ice\AMSR-E_Bremen\ScotiaSea\bwz_2006\*.hdf

4.  A a standard grid and land mask was overlaid and the HDF files were converted to PNG with wam_series.

5. Finally, animated GIFs were created for various time periods (July-August for 2004 and 2005) with Babarosa GIF Animator. The animated GIFs are shown below.