Daily maps of classified Arctic sea ice indicating whether it is first-year (FY) or multi-year (MY) derived from QuikSCAT data. The product is generated on standard SCP polar stereographic grid for the Arc region coresponding to QuikSCAT egg (quev or queh) images. This data product is described in the paper below. Note that the resolution of browse .gif images has been reduced by a factor of two. Data can be accessed from the ftp site and the web page.

This product is primarily designed to map MY ice. The ocean/sea ice edge is low resolution since it is determined from the AMSR 6 GHz channel (see reference). The flag values stored in the SIR array are:
-2 : no data
-1 : land
0 : ocean
1 : first year (FY) ice
2 : multi year (MY) ice

To visualize the product, individual browse images are available for each date. An animated gif of the full time series is available here (76 MB). White is MY ice, light grey is FY ice, mid gray is open ocean, dark grey is land, and black is ocean masked out of the processsing. Note that once the summer melt season starts, surviving ice is labeled as MY.

Reference:

A.M. Swan and D.G. Long, "Multi-Year Arctic Sea Ice Classification Using QuikSCAT", IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 50, No. 9, pp. 3317-3326, 2012.