Update of OSI SAF sea ice emissivity and LR sea ice drift products

We are pleased to announce that the OSI SAF sea ice emissivity and LR sea ice drift products will be updated on 4th March 2025. On this date 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. 

Until the hard switch both the current and new versions of these products are available on our FTP server in parallel (anonymous login).
The current versions of the products are available here:
ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice/emis
ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod/ice/drift_lr/merged

The new versions of the products are available here:
ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod_test/ice/emis
ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod_test/ice/drift_lr/merged

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

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