A dataset of sea ice concentration from thermal infrared imagery in the Arctic

With the declining Arctic sea ice extent, it is increasingly desirable for high resolution sea ice concentration (SIC) monitoring. Based on a traditional and newly-developed thermal infrared (TIR) ice concentration retrieval algorithm (namely, MPA and TIRIA, respectively), SICs were estimated with MODIS TIR data in the Arctic. In addition, binary ice/water maps were derived from MODIS near-infrared (NIR) data using a histogram thresholding approach, and converted to SIC at the same resolution as TIR data. This dataset includes: (1) SICs from 35 MODIS TIR images with spatial resolution of 1 km; (2) Ice/water classification maps from 22 MODIS NIR images with spatial resolution of 250 m; (3) SICs concerted from the ice/water classification maps with resolution of 1 km.