VIIRS Sea ice leads detections using a U-Net

AI is used to identify sea ice leads in thermal imagery from the 11 µm from VIIRS (band I-5, SNPP and NOAA-20 imagery). A U-Net detection model is run for each satellite overpass and reported as daily aggregated results. The lead detection results are projected into a standard 1 km resolution EASE-Grid 2.0 projection. The included data arrays are the daily number satellite overpasses, number of overpasses a lead is identified, the maximum lead detection score from the U-Net, and a lead mask for each EASE-Grid 2.0 pixel. Daily files are compressed inside November through April seasonal tar files.