Sea Ice CCI Prototype System for Radar Altimeter Sea Ice Thickness Processing
Rinne, Eero¹; Mäkynen, Marko¹; Giles, Katharine²; Pechorro, Ed^3
1Finnish Meteorological Institute, FINLAND; ²University College London, UNITED KINGDOM; ³Logica, UNITED KINGDOM

Sea Ice Thickness (SIT) is considered as one of the essential climate variables. Sea ice has an impact on different fluxes between ocean and atmosphere. In consequence changes in sea ice affect the climate system. In order to better understand and forecast the changing climate and validate models, observations of the sea ice thickness are needed. One of the major outcomes of the Sea Ice Climate Change Initiative (SICCI) project is an open source Radar Altimeter (RA) processor prototype to produce SIT products from RA data. The main input data for the processor are SGDR data from Envisat, ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites. For ERS we use REAPER re-processed data. The output of our processor is a monthly SIT product in 100 km by 100 km grid for the winter months 1993-2012. Our processor will rely heavily on the existing RA SIT retrieval methodology developed by University College of London but will also utilise the recent results from the SICCI round robin exercise. The prototype processor will be an important step towards operational SIT processing in the phase 2 of the CCI programme. We present the technical aspects of our sea ice thickness prototype processor. We also present the status of ECV product creation and give examples of preliminary SIT products.