News and releases

The news and releases for the OSI SAF High Latitude processing centre are now also accessible via a RSS flux. You can easily syndicate to this flux by clicking on the RSS icon or by adding the address http://osisaf.met.no/news/news-rss.xml to your favourite News Reader.

The OSI SAF sea ice products for 2013-04-26 were not distributed as usual on the morning of 2013-04-27, due to a production error. The files have been uploaded to the FTP server and can be collected as usual on:

ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice or
ftp://osisaf.met.no/archive/ice

Due to a technical problem at the common SSM/I and SSMIS processing center in the US, all our sea ice products with date 2013-04-16 show large areas of missing data.
The issue is now fixed, data flow is resumed, and we expect tomorrow's sea ice products to have nominal coverage.

During Easter there was a problem with the production of sea ice products at OSI SAF. No products were produced for the dates 24th and 25th March. Norminal production was resumed on the 26th.

The sea ice concentration, edge, type and drift products have been recovered, but based on SSM/I data instead of SSMIS data (no change in file structure or file naming). The sea ice drift products will not be reproduced. The missing products are now available on our ftp server in the usual directories (ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice and ftp://osisaf.met.no/archive/ice). We are sorry for the inconveniences this data gap might have caused.

The OSI SAF FTP server and web portal experienced problems just after midnight today. The upgrade yesterday seems not to be stable, and the servers have been reset to the old setup. The servers are now back on line.

The OSISAF high latitude FTP and web portal servers will be upgraded today at 1200 UTC. The services provided by these servers might be partly unavailable during the upgrade, which should take abort 30 minutes. This involves http://osisaf.met.no and ftp://osisaf.met.no.

If you have any problems after 1300 UTC, please report to us on email osisaf-manager@met.no.

The OSI SAF Low-Resolution Sea Ice Drift (LRSID) product (OSI-405) over the Southern Hemisphere (SH) is now ready for distribution. Disseminations started 7th March, both over EUMETCast and from our FTP server (ftp://osisaf.met.no). The SH files are available at the same directories as the Northern Hemisphere (NH) files, with the same file name convention. The only difference is that \"nh\" is replaced with \"sh\" in the file names.

Updated validation report and Product User Manual will shortly be made available in the Documentation section.

Note that due to atmosperic noise and surface melting, it is not possible to process reliable ice motion vector during (austral) summer. The availability period for the OSISAF SH LRSID product is accordingly from April 1st to October 31st.

Updated validation results for the sea ice concentration and sea ice edge products after the switch to SSMIS are now available at http://osisaf.met.no/validation/val_greenland.html. Select the "last quarter" plots. All the results after 19.02.2013 are based on SSMIS, while the results before are based on SSM/I.

For those users who are interested in looking closer on the difference between sea ice products based on SSMIS and products based on SSM/I, we have made available products based on SSM/I at this location:
ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod_test/ice.
Be aware that these SSM/I-based products are not operational. The regular OSI SAF sea ice products based on SSMIS are available here:
ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice.
The SSMIS products are labelled pre-operational since they have not been fully validated. The test products will be available until the pre-operational SSMIS-based products are declared operational.

The OSI SAF has now decided that the switch from SSM/I to SSMIS as input to the operational sea ice products is made permanent. This means that all the OSI SAF sea ice products previously based on SSM/I data are now based on SSMIS.

The validation of the sea ice products based on SSMIS is not complete yet, so the status of the products are changed from operational to pre-operational. The products will be pre-operational until the full validation is reviewed later this spring. This will have no influence on the distribution of the products. The file names are also the same as before, so as user you should not see any change. The only change is that the metadata will be updated with correct satellite information and the pre-operational status.

More intermediate validation results will be presented here next week.
Please contact us at osisaf-manager@met.no if you have any questions.

As reported this weekend, the OSI SAF has switched to using SSMIS data instead of SSMI data for the operational sea ice products. This change affects the products dated 19-01-2013 and newer. This change was done because the SSMI data we receive are currently corrupted. We will continue to use SSMIS data until further notice. Some illustration of the impact of this change on the ice concentration product can be seen on this web site:

As the SSMI data received at OSI SAF are still corrupted, we have chosen to switch to SSMIS data for the operational OSI SAF sea ice products. The use of SSMIS data for sea ice production have been tested for some time, but is not yet fully validated. Still, the tests so far has shown that the difference between using SSMI and SSMIS has only a small impact on the products.

This change will impact in the products to be delivered 20-01-2013, that is with date stamp 19-01-2013.

The OSI SAF sea ice products produced this morning (dated 2013-01-18) are degraded due to corrupted input SSMI data. The data provider have been notified, but it is uncertain when the input data will be corrected.

There are still some problems with the FTP and HTTP servers at the OSI SAF HL Center, osisaf.met.no. The servers will be down for maintenance for up to 30 minutes between 12:00 and 14:00 CET.

Due to internal network problems at met.no, the OSI SAF FTP and web servers for sea ice and high latitude SST and Flux products suffers from occasionally slower connection and interruptions. It is uncertain when the cause of the problem will be fixed. We are sorry for the inconvenience this might cause.
In case of problems, please contact us by email to osisaf-manager@met.no.

Due to network problems at met.no, the OSI SAF AHL SST product were not available in time on the OSI SAF High Latitude FTP server on 8th and 9th December. The products were available in time on EUMETCast.
The network problem has now been resolved, and distribution is back to nominal.

Due to problems at NOAA ESPC some SSMI F15 orbits were not received by the OSI SAF. This data outage affected the OSI SAF products dated 26112012 and 27112012, where some areas are missing data.

The data stream is back to nominal now and the products that will be delivered tomorrow morning (dated 28112012) will have full coverage.

Due to network problems at met.no, the OSI SAF High Latitude FTP and HTTP servers were unavailable a few hours this morning. This affected the availability of OSI SAF Sea Ice products, AHL SST product and AHL Flux products through FTP, as well as the OSI SAF HL web portal.
The servers are now back online, and the network problems have been resolved.

The OSI SAF High Latitude FTP and HTTP servers will have hardware maintenance on Thursday 18th October between 13:00 and 13:30 CET. The FTP server ftp://osisaf.met.no and HTTP server http://osisaf.met.no will be partly unavailable during this upgrade.

Parts of the OSI SAF FTP archive of sea ice products is currently compressed with gzip. The compressed files will be uncompressed on Tuesday 16th October. This is to make the files directly available in a THREDDS and WMS server.

The files in question are stored at this location:
ftp://osisaf.met.no/archive/ice

The OSI SAF Sea Ice Team is happy to introduce daily updated sea ice extent graphs from the OSI SAF High Latitude web portal:

http://osisaf.met.no/p/ice_extent_graphs.php

Both daily, seasonal and monthly graphs are available for the Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent. More information about the graphs are available on the web site.

Due to technical problems with the AVHRR production servers at met.no, the AHL SST, DLI and SSI products for high latitudes had reduced coverage on 13th June. The problem was fixed during the evening and the production is now back to nominal.

The Low Resolution Sea Ice Drift product now has an online Validation and Monitoring page. It will regularly display updated validation results.

Access this new resource here.

Validation reports are available at any time from the Documentation section.

The NetCDF format of the OSI SAF Sea Ice Concentration, Edge and Type products (OSI-401, OSI-402 and OSI-403) have been upgraded, as well as the file name convention. The reprocessed Sea Ice Concentration product (OSI-409) and LR Sea Ice Drift (OSI-405) product have not been changed. The reason for these changes is to provide all ice products using the same meta data convention (CF-1.4) and to harmonize the content of these three products with the more recent released OSI-405 and OSI-409 products.

More detailed information about the upgrade is available here: http://osisaf.met.no/p/ice/new_ice_netcdf_format.html

To assure that the users have good time to adapt to the new format specifications, the old format will be provided in parallel with the new format until 15th September 2012.

The OSI SAF sea ice production is now back to nominal and the sea ice concentration, edge and type products should be delivered as normal tomorrow morning at around 04:30 UTC (2012-04-24).

The missing products will be reprocessed and will be available on our FTP server (ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod).

Due to an unexpected problem with the delivery of SSMI input data to the OSI SAF, we have not been able to produce any sea ice products since 21. April. The problem has been reported to the data provider, and we are hoping for a quick recovery.

If all goes well, we might be able to deliver ice concentration, edge and type products as nominal tomorrow morning, 24-04-2012.
Sea ice drift products will be two days more delayed, since it uses three days of data.

Due to outage of SSMI data from our data provider, yesterdays (produced today) OSI SAF Sea Ice Concentration, Edge and Type products contain some missing data areas.
The data stream is now back to nominal and the next sea ice products should be complete.

Due to a problem with the distribution of products to our FTP server, the sea ice products were 3 hours delayed at the OSI SAF FTP server today. The distribution is now back to nominal.

The low resolution sea ice drift production failed this morning. The production has been re-run and the latest product is now available through our FTP server as usual, ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod

The SSM/I data stream from NOAA is now back to nominal, and data since 09UTC are available. The OSI SAF sea ice products might still experience missing data areas in the the product that will be distributed around 04 UTC tomorrow (14-12-2011).

Due to a problem with the data flow of SSM/I data to NOAA, the OSI SAF has not received SSM/I data since yesterday afternoon. This results in missing orbits of input data to the sea ice concentration, edge and type products and there are a few holes of missing data in the products dated 12.12.2011.
This issue has been reported and we hope the problem will be sorted out soon.

The NWP input data for the OSI SAF global sea ice concentration, edge and type products have been updated on 12-12-2011. These products now use the 0.25 degree resolution ECMWF NWP fields for the atmospheric correction that is applied to the brightness temperatures. Previously the 0.5 degree resolution fields were used. The update has a minor positive effect on the sea ice products.

The OSI SAF reprocessed sea ice concentration data set (OSI-409) has been updated and a new version v1.1 released. Two changes has been introduced to the new version of the data set:

• Fixed bug in uncertainty estimates.
• Extended data set period, now covering October 1978 - October 2009.

From 31 October to 3 November 2011 the EUMETSAT-sponsored training project EUMeTrain will host an event week on Ocean and Sea applications.

This EUMeTrain event week consists of several online sessions. The event week should serve as an exchange on the experience for the forecasting on shiproutes, but also advocate the benfits that the use of ASCAT data (Metop) as well as the radar altimetry data povided by Jason-2 can have to the operational maritime forecaster.

Registration for this event week is required. When you have registered you will automatically receive the required invitation. For those of you that will miss this event, all the sessions will be recorded for download.

EUMeTrain is EUMETSATs largest international training project which develops training material and the supports training in the field of satellite meteorology in combination with other meteorological data sources. EUMeTrains main goal is training and providing training material, supporting the EUMETSAT programs with special weight on hazardous weather events.

Further information on the event and the full timetable are available on the EUMeTrain website.

Due to a temporary failure of our FTP servers early Monday 10th Oct 2011, todays sea ice products (dated 20111009) were delayed on ftp://osisaf.met.no.
Note that this did not impact distribution on EUMETCast.
All systems are back to normal now.

On October 4th 2011, the AMSR-E instrument stopped functionning due to a problem with the antenna rotation.
As a consequence, the Low-Resolution Sea Ice Drift (LRSID) product delivered on Oct 5th, and covering sea ice displacements from Oct 2nd to 4th has incomplete AMSR-E coverage.
As of today, no new AMSR-E data was received at met.no and we thus expect reduced or no coverage in the coming days as well.
While NASA and JAXA investigate, users of the LRSID product should be prepared to experience limited or no coverage in the AMSR-E single-sensor product, while the multi-sensor/merged product achieves nominal coverage with ASCAT and SSM/I.

Missing SSM/I data caused missing sea ice concentration coverage over the Beaufort Sea and Canadian Arctic Archipelago in the NH product with timestamp 06-08-2011 12 utc, and over Cosmonaut Sea in the SH product with same timestamp.
Coverage is back to nominal in both NH and SH product files dated 07-08-2011.

The distribution of ASCAT data was back to nominal on 16. May at 10:51 (after a data outage since 14. May). The sea ice edge and type products for 16. May therefore had partial coverage of ASCAT data. The product for 17. May had normal coverage.

Due to missing ASCAT data since 14. May, the OSI SAF sea ice edge and sea ice type products are currently produced without the expected ASCAT input. These two multi sensor sea ice products are therefore delivered based on SSM/I alone, and the missing ASCAT input may lead to reduced quality.
Nominal dissemination of ASCAT data is not expected to resume before 16.May at the earliest.

The OSI SAF Sea Ice FTP and HTTP servers will be moved to a new building on 5 May 2011 at 17:00 UTC.
This will cause the FTP and HTTP servers with the Sea Ice data and web portal http://osisaf.met.no to be down for approximately 2 hours.

Two pieces of product documentation were newly updated in the documentation section:
Global Sea Ice Concentration, Edge, and Type Products User's Manual (PUM), version 3.7
Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD) for the Low Resolution Sea Ice Drift product, version 1.0

A problem has been uncovered with the algorithm used for calculating the errors[uncertainties] in the reprocessed OSI SAF ice concentration dataset. Initial investigations show this problem leads to errors [erroneous uncertainties] being reported higher than supposed to for all concentration ranges.
The OSI SAF team will issue a new version of the reprocessed dataset with scheduled release in June 2011. Due to user requests the error terms will be given in this dataset as well as the total error. We apologize for the inconvenience this might cause.
For additional information, please contact osisaf-manager@met.no.

Due to a processing error, today's OSI-405 AMSR-E ice drift product (motion from 19th to 21st Februar) was not delivered at schedulded time. Both the ASCAT, SSM/I and MULTI-OI OSI-405 ice drift products were processed and distributed according to schedule.
The OSI-405 AMSR-E and MULTI-OI files were re-processed and distributed on the FTP server at 09:25 utc.

Due to a data outage of SSM/I F-15 data from NOAA/FNMOC during several hours yesterday, the latest OSI SAF Sea Ice products (dated 15.02.2011) have missing data in a sector from 20W to 80W. The data distribution from NOAA is back to nominal and the next sea ice products should be normal.

As announced earlier, a new ftp and http server for the OSI SAF sea ice products will be replacing the old server tomorrow morning 10th February 2011. This switch should not affect the users, but in case of problems, please contact us on email: osisaf-prod_AT_met.no.
The new server is named osisaf.met.no, but the old addresse saf.met.no will still work as an alias.

The sea ice products covering the limited HL area will be removed from EUMETCast distribution on 15 November 2010. The HL sea ice products are superseded by the global sea ice products, as the HL area is fully covered by the NH products.
The HL sea ice products will still be available from the Sea Ice FTP server for a few more months (ftp://osisaf.met.no).

An article introducing the Continuous Maximum Cross-Correlation (CMCC) method and its validation in the Arctic was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans.
The CMCC algorithm is implemented in the Low Resolution Sea Ice Drift product of the OSI SAF.
Reference to the manuscript can be accessed here.

The processing and dissemination of sea ice drift vectors from low-resolution imaging sensors (OSI-405) was succesfully resumed today 4 October 2010. As planned, the first product grid to be disseminated corresponds to drift vectors from 1 October to 3 October. During Arctic summer, atmospheric noise and surface melting prevent the unambiguous retrieval of sea ice motion vectors from the sensors and channels we use. Accordingly, no sea ice motion vectors are distributed from 1 May to 30 September.
Throughout the season, ice motion in the Arctic can be monitored on our quicklooks page and product files can be accessed in near-real-time on the OSI SAF HL FTP server.
More information on the sea ice drift product OSI-405 is found here.

Two new reports dealing with validation of the sea ice drift products are available from the documentation section:
Hwang and Lavergne (2010), Validation and Comparison of OSI SAF Low and Medium Resolution and IFREMER/Cersat Sea ice drift products
Hwang and Lavergne (2010), Triple Comparison of OSI SAF Low Resolution Sea ice drift products
(Phil) Byongjun Hwang, from the Scottish Association of Marine Science (SAMS, UK), performed these two studies during an Associated Scientist activity with the OSI SAF.

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products that was supposed to be distributed at 24.08.2010 around 04:30UTC, with timestap 20100823, have been delayed due to failure on the operational processing machine. The delayed files have now bin distributed to our ftp server, ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice, where they can be downloaded.

The OSI SAF High Latitude (Sea Ice, SST and Flux) web portal will gradually migrate from http://osisaf.met.no to http://osisaf.met.no. While both websites are currently kept synchronized, users are invited to readily update their bookmarks and start visiting us at the new URL.
The two FTP servers ftp://osisaf.met.no and ftp://osisaf.met.no will soon be merged.

The OSI SAF Sea Ice Concentration, Edge and Type products on NetCDF format previously available on the FTP server ftp://mersea.met.no/mersea/seaice have now been moved to a new server: ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod_netcdf/ice. The old FTP server will be closed down 24. May 2010. We therefore ask our users to start using the new server as soon as possible.

The Opendap server at mersea.met.no has been replaced with a Thredds server available at http://osisaf.met.no/thredds/catalog/osisaf/met.no/prod_netcdf/catalog.html.

This change do not affect the Sea Ice Drift products on NetCDF format or the Concentration, Edge and Type files on GRIB and HDF5 format.
The two FTP servers ftp://osisaf.met.no and ftp://osisaf.met.no will soon be merged.

The OSI SAF Low Resolution Sea Ice Drift (LRSID) product is now available through EUMETCast (starting from today), together with the other OSI SAF sea ice products.
The products are delivered on NetCDF3 format, and typical file names are: S-OSI_-NOR_-MULT-NH_LRSIDRIFT-20104071200Z.nc.gz.
The products are delivered through this EUMETCast channel: SAF-Global.
More details about the sea ice drift product are available in the LRSID Product Manual, available from the documentation section of this website.

A new version of the validation and monitoring report for the Low Resolution Sea Ice Drift product of the OSI SAF is available from the documentation section of this website.
The new report documents validation results for 3 years (2006-2007, 2007-2008 and 2008-2009) for the single- and multi-sensor datasets. It will later be updated with the 2009-2010 results.

Exceptional sea ice conditions in the Skagerrak Strait (between Norway, Sweden and Denmark) and Oslo fjord are monitored with a new algorithm using the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument.
This new method is the basis for the upcoming OSI SAF Regional Sea Ice Edge product, scheduled Summer 2010.
Read the full story here.

Daily images of the Low Resolution Sea Ice Drift product are now available from the quicklooks page. For the time being, they are limited to the merged (multi sensor) product, from December 2009 onwards, zoomed over the Arctic Ocean. We are currently working on extending the time series.
Dissemination of the Low Resolution Sea Ice Drift product started in mid-December 2009 as daily NetCDF product files available from the OSISAF HL FTP server.

Since the updated sea ice edge and type products as well as the new sea ice drift datasets are now distributed from the main FTP directories for sea ice products, their distribution to the ftp://osisaf.met.no/testprod directory will be terminated next Monday (21st December).

A RSS feed mechanism was activated from the OSISAF HL website for easing access to our local News items. Interested users are invited to syndicate to this flux with their preferred reader. This functionality is still in a beta stage and was not yet fully tested on all possible news reader nor web browser. Do not hesitate to contact Webmaster for reporting malfunction or missing features.
Note: The official News and Services Messages from the main www.osi-saf.org are not part of this RSS mechanism. However, News and Service Messages pertaining to Sea Ice production will be cross-posted on this flux.

On December, 9th 2009, the OSI SAF HL processing chain was upgraded from version 3.2 to version 4.0. This upgrade was mainly concerned with the updated sea ice edge and sea ice type products and the introduction of the new low resolution sea ice drift product. The ice concentration production chain was not modified.

For easier maintenance and enhanced readibility, the directory architecture for the sea ice drift datasets is modified at the High Latitude FTP server.
A similar architecture will be setup for distribution of upcoming pre-operational sea ice drift daily production and archiving at the same FTP server.
We apologize for any incovenience this might have caused.

The DMSP F-13 SSM/I data are no longer available, due to failure of the last tape recorder. There is therefore only one available satellite with SSM/I data, DMSP F-15. The OSI SAF Sea Ice products are therefore currently based on data from this satellite only.
To compensate for less data coverage due to only one satellite being available, the OSI SAF daily sea ice products are now based on 36 hours of data (as announce earlier), instead of 24 hours as they used to be.
The OSI SAF team is currently testing SSMIS to replace the SSMI data, and plan to replace SSMI with SSMIS spring 2010, or earlier if F-15 fails

A new sea ice drift product is being made available from the OSI SAF production chain. Sea ice motion datasets are processed everyday from pairs of images acquired by passive and active microwave sensors (AMSR-E, SSM/I, ASCAT). The time-span of the displacement vectors is 48 hours and grid resolution is 62.5 km. For the time being, only the Northern Hemisphere region is processed and production is therefore pre-operational. Data dissemination is expected to begin on December, 8th 2009. More information about the product, data access, algorithms and validation can be found at:
http://osisaf.met.no/p/ice/index.html#lrdrift

New, improved OSI SAF Sea Ice Edge and Sea Ice Type products are almost ready for distribution. The plan is to replace the existing products with the new products on 8. December 2009. This upgrade do not affect the format or filename of the products. Until the upgrade both the old and new product will be available on our FTP server. More details about this and documentation of the improvements are available on this web page:
http://osisaf.met.no/p/ice/new_ice_edge_type.html.

Due to problems with the recorders on-board DMSP F13 and F15, parts of the SSMI orbits are lost during recorder dumps. This affects the OSI SAF Sea Ice Northern Hemisphere products. To ensure complete data coverage, the OSI SAF Sea Ice team has chosen to increase the period of input data used in the daily sea ice analysis. The latest 32hours of SSMI data are now used, instead of the latest 24 hours. This solution will be used until the second recorder on-board F15 is working again. The OSI SAF Sea Ice team is also working on implementing the use of SSMIS instead of SSMI.

14.10.2009 - Degraded Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice products

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products processed approx. 2009-10-14 04:15UTC, with timestamp 2009-10-13 12:00UTC were degraded in the form of a stripe of missing data covering the European sector (Fram Strait and Svalbard). This was caused by degraded and/or missing SSM/I data.

11.03.2009 - Degraded Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice products

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products processed approx. 2009-03-11 04:15UTC, with timestamp 2009-03-10 12:00UTC contained noise in the form of false lower ice concentration around Greenland. This was caused by degraded SSM/I data. The degraded data have been removed and the sea ice products reprocessed. These corrected products are now available on our anonymous FTP server, ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice.

05.03.2009 - Degradation of SSM/I F15 data

NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center) has reported that the 22 GHz channels on the SSM/I instrument onboard the DMSP F15 is drifting. This may affect the filtering of weather system induced noise in the processing of sea ice products. However, the production of sea ice products at the OSI SAF uses NWP data to correct the SSM/I brightness temperatures. This reduces the noise from weather systems significantly. Therefore OSI SAF sea ice products are at present insignificantly affected by this sensor drift. Anyway, the OSI SAF team is currently preparing for replacing the SSMI F15 data with SSMIS F16 data.

07.11.2008 - Delayed sea ice products on FTP server

All ice products with time stamp 06/11/2008 were delayed on the OSISAF ftp servers. They are now available (11:00 utc). Distribution via EUMETCast was not affected.

01.10.2008 - Duplicate Sea Ice products on EUMETCast

The daily OSI SAF Sea Ice products have previously been distributed twice daily by mistake at about 04.20 and 05.10 UTC. The distribution has now been changed and the daily sea ice products are now distributed once at about 04.20 UTC.

19.09.2008 - Degraded Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice products

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products producted approx. 2008-09-19 04:15UTC, with timestamp 2008-09-18 12:00UTC contained noise in the form off false ice around Svalbard. This was caused by degraded SSM/I data. The degraded data have been removed and the sea ice products reproduced. These updated products are now available on our anonymous FTP server, ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice.

03.08.2008 - Missing Sea Ice products

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products producted approx. 2008-08-03 04:15UTC, with timestamp 2008-08-02 12:00UTC were not produced because of a machine overload at met.no. Therefor the products were not available on EUMETCast. The products are now available on the FTP server, ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice.

The production is now nominal.

Due to a failure in the operation production system (Monday 14th July, approx. 16:00 UTC to approx. 22:00 UTC), the 12 Hourly SST 'High Latitude' products with time stamp 2008-07-14:19h15utc was not delivered.

The systems are now back to nominal status and production has resumed as of 2008-07-15:07h15utc.

Due to construction work related to the power supply at METNO, the OSI SAF ftp server and web portal for sea ice products may be inaccessible in periods on April 26 and 27, 2008.

Yesterdays (26.03.2008) OSI SAF Sea Ice products for the Northern Hemisphere (producted this morning) contains errors east of Greenland because of positioning error in the SSMI data. The errouneous input data have been removed and the products regenerated. The improved products are available through our anonymous ftp server:osisaf.met.no under:

prod/ice/conc/ice_conc_nh_200803261200.*
prod/ice/edge/ice_edge_nh_200803261200.*
prod/ice/type/ice_type_nh_200803261200.*

We are sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused.

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products were delayed today because of an internal error in the OSI SAF production system. The error has been fixed. Because of this, the sea ice products were not available on EUMETCast. But the products are available through our anonymous ftp server, ftp://osisaf.met.no under prod/ice. We are sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused.

The SST algorithms for NOAA-17 and NOAA-18 for the High Latitude SST product has been upgraded. Validation results showed a negative bias for both satellites. This negative bias was improved by introducing the algorithm coefficients used for the NAR product. The change was effective starting with the 12 hourly HL SST product centered at 1200UTC 14.02.2008, produced at 18UTC.

The AMSR-E data stream is up and working again, and the OSI SAF Sea Ice Concentration products are again available.

The OSI SAF Sea Ice demonstration product based on AMSR-E data is currently missing. The AMSR-E data are missing from NASA because of a data processing failure. The AMSR-E data stream should be up again by Thursday or Friday this week.

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products distribution over EUMETCast was back to nominal this morning and all products available.

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products where not distributed over EUMETCast this morning because of problems with the EUMETCast dissemination (channel 3). The problems are being investigated at EUMETSAT and will hopefully be solved soon. The Sea Ice products are also available through FTP at ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod.

A new sea ice concentration test product based on AMSR-E is available. The OSI SAF team has implemented an algorithm for processing AMSR-E data for sea ice concentration, similar to the SSM/I based product. The products are available at the download page.

A new tool for browsing the daily and monthly sea ice products quality monitoring images is available at the validation pages. These quality monitoring images are the result of the daily manual inspection of the sea ice products performed by the ice analyst on duty at the DMI Ice Service. These images will tell the users if there are any anomalies in the products caused by misclassification, lack of input data etc. The images can be browsed one at the time, or two at the same time for comparison. An archive of these images are available back to September 2006.

During Arctic summer season (May-September) the ice type product is dubious because melting of the ice surface obscures the ice type signals. We therefor advice our users not to use the northern hemisphere ice type product in this period. Regarding the southern hemisphere ice type product there is almost no multi year sea ice present throughout the year at all.

The Southern Hemisphere sea ice products have now been declared operational by the OSI SAF Steering Group. The SH products are now distributed throught EUMETCast in trial mode until 11. April when they will be operationally available also through EUMETCast. The SH products are now also available in the ftp archive (back to 01.01.2007), under ftp://osisaf.met.no/archive/ice.

Yesterdays OSI SAF Sea Ice products are degraded because of missing SSMI data. There is a problem with the SSMI data stream from UKMO/NESDIS. The data stream is now up again and todays product (available tomorrow morning) should be okay.

The OSI SAF Sea Ice products were not received over EUMETCast this morning because of a bandwidth problem at the EUMETCast uplink server. The problem was fixed this afternoon.

At the status page on 07.12.2006 it is indicated that the OSI SAF Ice products were not received over EumetCAST. This is only the case locally at met.no, due to a hardware failure on the EumetCAST receiving system.

A new section with validation information has been added. Validation results for the Sea Ice products is now available under http://osisaf.met.no/validation.

19.05.2006

The OSISAF processing chain will be upgraded 22 May.

Upgraded sea ice products, improved statistics and atmospheric correction:

• New landmask which for example mask out ice plateau in the Weddel in Antarctica.
• Classification of open water instead of missing data south of 40N (NH product) and north of 40S (SH product).
• SSM/I Preprocessing:
  • Improved radiative transfer model for 85 GHz.
  • A new global tiepoint set has been developed using principal component analysis to determine clusters of sea ice and open water. It is global, more objective and based on a longer time series than the data set used previously. The monthly tiepoints allow to account for the mean annual cycle in sea ice emissivity.
• SSM/I ice concentration
  • Upgrade of the SSM/I hybrid sea ice concentration algorithm: NASA team is replaced by Bristol algorithm.

Upgrade of DLI processing, NWP handling modified.

The OSISAF processing chain will be upgraded in week 21. This implies an upgrade of the NCSA HDF5 library used to generate the OSISAF HDF5 files. Previously HDF5-1.4.4 was used, with the new software this will be changed to HDF5-1.6.4. users of the HDF5 files should be aware of this.

More information on the algorithm consequences will be provided later.

The NOAA AVHRR local reception at met.no failed yesterday because of an error with the TBUS messages. Because of this the high latitude OSI SAF SST products that were delivered from met.no yesterday evening and this morning were empty or missing. This affected these products:

SST12HL_200602261200.grb (only missing data)
SST12HL_200602270000.grb (only missing data)
DAILY_SSI_200602261200.grb (missing)
DAILY_DLI_200602261200.grb (missing)

The error in the local reception has been fixed and the production is now running as normal.

The NOAA AVHRR local reception at met.no failed yesterday. Because of this the high latitude OSI SAF SST products that were delivered from met.no yesterday evening and this morning were empty or missing. This affected these products:

SST12HL_200602211200 (empty)
SST12HL_200602220000 (empty)
DAILY_SSI_200602211200 (missing)
DAILY_DLI_200602201200 (missing)

The error in the local reception has been fixed and the production is now running as normal.

The Northern Hemisphere (NH) Sea Ice products for sea ice edge, concentration and type are now available throught the EUMETCast service on GRIB format, in addition to the HL products. The file names for these products have the form S-OSI_-NOR_-MULT-GL_NH_CONC__-200602131200Z.grb. More information about these files can be found in the Product Manual for Sea Ice products available under Documentation.
More information about EUMETCast is available at the EUMETSAT web pages, http://www.eumetsat.int.

A new test product is now available. This is an improved sea ice type product where SSM/I and Seawind Quikscat data are combined in a multi sensor analysis. The current operational sea ice type product only use SSM/I. The test products are available under Products/Download. Documentation about the new test products is available under Documentation.

The OSI SAF High Latitude web pages have been upgraded. The design have been changed to better resemble the main OSI SAF pages. A new page with production status have also been added. So far only for sea ice. Flux and sst will be added.

The problem with the Internet connection have been repaired. The distribution of Sea Ice products through EUMETCast is back to nominal.

The Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice product has been reviewed by EUMETSAT and is close to be declared for operational. It will then be disseminated through EUMETCast together with the HL product. This dissemination is expected to start in December 2005.

A new updated version of the Sea Ice Product Manual (v3.2) is available. See under Documents.

The problem with the Internet connection between OSI SAF/met.no and EUMETSAT have been identified and will be repaired. In the mean time a backup distribution has been established and the OSI SAF Sea Ice products are now available again over EUMETCast. The products might be a bit delayed compared to usual dissemination.

There is a problem in the FTP-connection between OSI SAF/met.no and EUMETSAT. The Sea Ice products are therefore not available over EUMETCast (since 16.10.2005). We are investigating the problem. The Sea Ice products are available at the OSI SAF Sea Ice FTP-server.

Some changes on the web-pages, mainly design and added some information.
New versions of sea ice product manual and osihdf5 format documentation, see under Documents.

The was a cut in the SSM/I data stream from UK Met.Office which caused some areas with missing data in the OSI SAF Sea Ice products from 04.09.2005. The data stream is now working as usual again.
The products from 04.09.2005 have be reproduced, and the data products at the ftp-server have been replaced.

Sea Ice products for the Southern Hemisphere (SH) are now available at the ftp-server ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod, together with the Northern Hemisphere (NH) and northern Atlantic (HL/multi) products.
These products are test products as they are still being validated, and must be used with precautions. They will be available at the ftp-server under the same processing conditions as for the NH products.
The SH products have not yet been masked for the large ice shelves or coastal glaciers. This will be done in autumn 2005.

The was an anomaly in the SSM/I data stream from ECMWF which caused large areas with missing data in the OSI SAF Sea Ice products from 21.06.2005. The error has been corrected and the products from 21.06.2005 have been reproduced. The data products at the ftp-servers have been replaced.

The Flux products were not processed last night due to a forced server reboot, the problem is being investigated.

OSI SAF ice concentration and SST products are from today used daily in the HIRLAM20 model. SST fields are updated at 00 ad 12 UTC from the MAP (Merged Atlantic Product) product. Ice concentration fields are updated from O&SI SAF ice products at 12 UTC daily.

No SST product today caused by problems with AVHRR data retrieval.

The OSI SAF High Latitude software was upgraded to version 3.1 on 28.03.2005. The upgrade includes:
* New sea ice product area covering the Northern Hemisphere.
* Small changes to the sea ice data formats (see Sea Ice Users manual v3.0).
* Smaller changes in SST and Flux software.
* General upgrade of the software.

The OSI SAF chain running at met.no has been upgraded to version 3.0 on 09.06.2004. The upgrade includes:
* Use of AVHRR data processed by AAPP and ANA.
* Improved software for SSI and DLI products.
* Quickscat ice type products are now available for test purposes.
* General upgrade of the software.

The NOAA-16 satellite is now removed from the SST-processing because of malfunctioning AVHRR instrument.

From 13.04.2004 SSM/I data is decoded north of 40 degrees, instead of 50 degrees. Leading to a larger coverage in the ice product.
Flux products quicklooks are now available!

The production of products was stopped saturday 20.03.2004 due to an error. It is now fixed and should be working again

Flux products are now available for download. Quicklooks will soon be available.

The software is updated, to version 2.0, and now running on Linux

The documentation page is updated and new scientific and technical documents are available.

The documentation page is updated and new documents available.

The problems concerning quicklooks of sea ice products are fixed so updated products should be available from now on.

Quicklooks of the sea ice products have not been generated for some days due to a processing problem. The problem is identified and will probably be fixed within this week.

Added link page.

The High Latitude Ocean and Sea Ice SAF website has been redesigned and products are made available both in full resolution HDF5 and GRIB files, as well as in a quicklook archive set up with JPEG imagery in thumbnail and full format.