ASCAT-A Arctic daily sea ice extent and backscatter maps

The sea ice extent and normalized backscatter from the ASCAT scatterometer on Metop-A result from the Bayesian discrimination of measured backscatter distances to prescribed ocean wind and sea ice geophysical model functions. The sea ice product contains the Bayesian sea ice probability and a proxy age of sea ice mapped onto 12.5 km polar stereographic grids. The sea ice extent is formed when the sea ice probability crosses a certain threshold, and the proxy age of sea ice is converted to (normalized VV C-band) sea ice backscatter using the instructions detailed in the User Manual.