Backscatter-derived Antarctic sea ice roughness proxy from ASCAT

A primary determinant of microwave backscatter is the Rayleigh-scale roughness. For instruments observing at C-band and at oblique angles, this corresponds to a roughness scale of ~ 1 cm. Using ASCAT, a C-band scatterometer in polar orbit, we can determine the backscatter (and hence cm-scale roughness) of the sea ice cover on the ocean. This dataset uses a complex parameterisation of multi-day (5-day) backscatter measurements to parameterise the backscatter into several parameters. For more details on the backscatter parameterisation, see Fraser et al., 2014 (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6527913). This dataset consists of 5-daily maps of all backscatter parameters spanning the time period from March 2007 to December 2017. Each map is presented as unformatted binary, and is provided in the NSIDC polar stereographic projection (12.5 km resolution, southern hemisphere, 632*664 px, 32-bit floating point - see https://nsidc.org/data/polar-stereo/ps_grids.html).