A daily 1 km seamless Antarctic sea ice albedo product from VIIRS data

Summary: In the context of climate change, the sea ice albedo feedback mechanism makes the albedo of Antarctic sea ice a crucial element in polar environmental evolution and global climate models. Existing albedo products for Antarctic sea ice are limited, with a coarse spatiotemporal resolution, and numerous data gaps due to persistent cloud cover. This study uses the Multiband Reflectance Iteration (MBRI) algorithm, which retrieves the Antarctic sea ice albedo using reflectance data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). Moreover, the study reconstructs the albedo of cloudy-sky pixels by integrating spatiotemporal information and physical models. A new 1 km daily seamless albedo product for Antarctic sea ice has been developed, covering the period from 2012 to 2021. The results, validated against the automatic weather stations data from the Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN), reveal that the proposed product has higher accuracy, finer spatiotemporal resolution, and superior spatial continuity compared to existing products. The algorithms used fully account for the anisotropy of the sea ice surface, and the high spatiotemporal resolution enables this dataset to enable quantitative analysis of both overall and localized Antarctic sea ice changes. This dataset is valuable for studying the radiation balance of Antarctic sea ice and conducting research in climate modeling.

Spatial resolution: 1 km

Temporal resolution: daily (2012-2021)

Format: GeoTIFF

Projection: This dataset adopts Sinusoidal projection and is gridded using the MODIS Sinusoidal Tile Grid

How to name and use data files: The dataset has a longitude range of 180°W to 180°E and a latitude range of 50°S to 80°S, covering 53 tiles (v14: h06~h29; v15: 09~h26; V16: h11~h17, h21~h24). The GeoTIFF file contains a band that represents the shortwave sea ice albedo under clear-sky or cloudy-sky conditions, with 16-bit integer values of 0-10000 and a scale factor of 0.0001. The ocean water and Antarctic continent are set to a filling value of -1. The file name is "Antarctic_Sea_Ice_Albedo_ {yyyyddd}_ {hv}.tif ”, where yyyy represents year, ddd represents day of the year, and hv represents the number of the tile. For example, "Antarctic_Sea_Ice_Albedo_2014270_h18v15.tif" represents the sea ice albedo data of the h18v15 area on the 270th day of 2014. 

Contacts: Weifeng Hao (haowf@whu.edu.cn), Chao Ma (macwhu@whu.edu.cn)