Beaufort Sea Landfast Sea Ice Extent Summarized by Month and 9-year Periods

A landfast ice dataset along the Beaufort Sea continental shelf, spanning 1996-2023. Spatial resolution is 100 m. Each month of the ice season (October through July) is summarized over three 9-year periods (1996-2005, 2005-2014, 2014-2023) using the minimum, maximum, median, and mean distance of SLIE from the coastline. The minimum extent indicates the region that was always occupied by landfast ice during a particular calendar month. The median extent indicates where landfast occurred at least 50% of the time. The maximum extent represents regions that may only have been landfast ice on one occasion during the selected time period. The mean SLIE position for the each month and and time period is also included. The dataset is derived from three sources: seaward landfast ice images derived from synthetic aperture radar images from the RadarSAT and EnviSAT constellations (1996-2008), the Alaska Sea Ice Program (ASIP) ice charts (2008-2017, 2019-2022), and the G10013 SIGID-3 Arctic Ice Charts produced by the National Ice Center (NIC; 2017-2019, 2022-2023).

Within each GeoTIFF file there are 8 different pixel values representing different characteristics:
0 - Ocean
1 - Maximum Landfast Ice Extent
2 - Median Landfast Ice Extent
3 - Minimum Landfast Ice Extent
4 - Mean Landfast Ice Edge
5 - Land
6 - Out of Domain
7 - Coast Vector Shadow

The file naming convention is as follows:
Beaufort_$month_$era_SLIE_MMM_summary.tif

For example, the name

Beaufort_05_2005-2014_SLIE_MMM_summary.tif

indicates the file represents data for May 2005-2014.

These data were updated on August 21, 2025 to rectify the omission of some NIC chart data sources for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons.