doi:10.5194/tc-8-1289-2014-supplement © Author(s) 2014. CC Attribution 3.0 License. Supplement of A spurious jump in the satellite record: has Antarctic sea ice expansion been overestimated?

• Main Author: I. Eisenman
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.431.7359; http://www.the-cryosphere.net/8/1289/2014/tc-8-1289-2014-supplement.pdf

Detailed description of data and methods Here we discuss the ice concentration fields analyzed in this study and the resulting time series of ice extent and ice area that we calculate. S1.1 Ice concentration The ice concentration data sets considered in this study are derived from passive microwave measurements from instruments flown on a series of satellites. The Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) was flown on the NASA Nimbus 7 satellite and provided data between 26 October 1978 and 20 August 1987, with the Bootstrap sea ice concentration using the data between 1 November 1978 and 31 July 1987. SSMR measured radiances in 10 channels including 18.0H, 18.0V, 21.0V, 37.0H, and 37.0V; here the number refers to the frequency in GHz and the letter indicates vertical (V) or horizontal (H) polarization. Although the Nimbus 7 passed over both polar regions every day, the radiometer operated only on alternate days due to power limitations, leading to a temporal resolution of 2 days. SMMR was succeeded by the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I), which measured radiances every day in 7 channels including 19.3H, 19.3V, 22.2V, 37.0H, and 37.0V. SSM/I instruments were flown on a sequence of three Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites beginning in July 1987. For the Bootstrap sea ice concentration, data from the DMSP F8 satellite is used from 1 August 1987 until 2 December 1991, data from the DMSP F11 satellite is used