Development and Validation of a Sea Ice Concentration Processing Chain for the First Phase of ESA CCI
Lavergne, Thomas¹; Nielsen, Esben²; Larsen, Kristian Rune²; Eastwood, Steinar¹; Tonboe, Rasmus²; Toudal Pedersen, Leif^2
1Norwegian Meteorological Institute, NORWAY; ²Denmarks Meteorological Institute, DENMARK

The ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Sea Ice project aims at defining, producing and validating state-of-the-art ECV of Sea Ice Thickness and Sea Ice Concentration from satellite data. During the first year of the project, user requirements analysis and a comprehensive algorithm selection study were conducted for the two variables. These research steps are now followed by an implementation phase in which we build and validate the processing software that will soon be used for generating the ECV.

In this paper, we concentrate on the development and test/validation activities around the Sea Ice Concentration processing chain, as well as on the main characteristics of the planned time series in terms of duration, coverage, data format, and expected data volume. We present both the general structure of the software, the technologies adopted for implementing the various processing steps and the test and validation framework that ensure the consistency of the software with its specifications.