AMSR2 - Sea Ice Concentration

NOAA CoastWatch / OceanWatch / PolarWatch Sea Ice Concentration, Level 3, daily and daily 4-day rolling merge, polar stereographic mapped composites - AMSR-2

Data Access

Data Tool Links	CoastWatch Near Real-Time Search
Sample Filenames	GWXCW_W2019203_C15_002140_020039_033940_051540_065439_083040_100940_114840_132440_150341_164242_182143_200342_214543_224240_NP06_IceConc.nc Where: GWXCW is W2019203 is W year and day of year: WYYYYdoy C15 indicates number of granules in composite (generally 14 or 15) Series of 6 digit numbers are start times each granule included in the composite NP06 (or SP06) indicates mapped to Polar Stereographic Projection for North Pole (NP06) or South Pole (SP06) Ice Conc is product name = Ice Concentration .nc is NetCDF format (CF compliant)
THREDDS	Aggregated and Per-file Views: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/thredds/socd/coastwatch/catalog_amsr2_gw1_ice_conc_daily.html Top Level Sea Ice Catalog: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/thredds/socd/coastwatch/catalog_coastwatch_ice.html
ERDDAP	https://coastwatch.noaa.gov/erddap/search/index.html?page=1&itemsPerPage=1000&searchFor=Ice+AMSR2

Product Overview

Polar Stereographic map projection of Sea Ice concentration of the Arctic ocean and Antarctica

The second Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR-2) on JAXA's Global Climate Observation Mission - Water 1 (GCOM-W1)
Daily composites and daily 4-day rolling merge composites
10 km spatial resolution
Polar Stereographic projections for North Pole and South Pole
Microwave not impacted by clouds
Source data from NOAA OSPO; NOGAPS algorithm developed by NOAA STAR (Paul Chang, Lead)

Product Details

Temporal Coverage

Daily and
Daily 4-day rolling merge

Product Families

Polar Sea Ice

Measurements

Sea Ice Concentration

Processing Levels

Level 3

Spatial Coverage

Polar (Artic/Antarctic)

Latency Groups

0 Hours <= 24 Hours (NRT)

Latency Details

Approximately 12 to 24 hours

Spatial Resolution Groups

2km+

Spatial Resolution Details

10 km

Platforms

GCOM-W

Instruments

AMSR2

Data Providers

JAXA

NASA

NOAA

NESDIS

OSPO

Documentation

STAR Development (Paul Chang, Lead)

https://manati.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/gcom

OSPO Monitoring and Documentation

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/atmosphere/gpds/algo.html

2026-01-14	New release of CoastWatch Utilities software (v4.1.5)
2026-01-14	Possible service interruption January 20th 1200 -1700Z
2025-11-21	Switch from Himawari-8 to Himawari-9
2025-09-11	Possible disruptions in ASCAT wind and SEVIRI SST products