New sea ice emissivity and LR sea ice drift products

We would like to remind our users that the OSI SAF sea ice emissivity and LR sea ice drift products will be updated tomorrow 4th March 2025. There will be a hard switch in the distribution of these two products from the current versions (OSI-404-a and OSI-405-c) to the new versions (OSI-404-b and OSI-405-d). This hard switch will be applied on all our distribution channels, including FTP, Thredds and EUMETCast. The first new products will be distributed on 4th March at about 04:30UTC, with timestamp 20240303. 

Documentation about the new versions of the products are available here, including product user manual, validation report and algorithm theoretical basis document:
Emissivity: https://osi-saf.eumetsat.int/products/osi-404-b
Drift: https://osi-saf.eumetsat.int/products/osi-405-d

The main updates for the emissivity product are a fix of the effective temperature variable (previously missing in the product), inclusion of horizontally polarized emissivity, separation of status flags for input and output (previously one flag), all variable fill values have been changed by setting them to NaN, change from NetCDF3 to NetCDF4 as output format, and changes in the products global attributes (please check the differences by comparing the old and new product files).

The main updates for the low resolution sea ice drift product are a switch from Metop-B to Metop-C for ASCAT data, change from NetCDF3 to NetCDF4 as output format, and changes in product global attributes.

For both products, the files that are distributed on EUMETCast will no longer have the .gz extension. Filename examples:
Current version: 
S-OSI_-DMI_-DMSP-GL_SH_EMIS__-202502041200Z.nc.gz
S-OSI_-NOR_-MULT-NH_LRSIDRIFT-202502041200Z.nc.gz
New version: 
S-OSI_-DMI_-DMSP-GL_SH_EMIS__-202502041200Z.nc
S-OSI_-NOR_-MULT-NH_LRSIDRIFT-202502041200Z.nc

The distribution of test files to our FTP server that has been available for the last month has been stopped.

Please refer to the updated user manuals for more details of the changes.
For questions, please contact us on email osisaf-manager@met.no

OSI SAF Sea Ice Team