Analysis by Antony Liu at GSFC has demonstrated the utility of scatterometer data in observing and tracking sea ice motion. He found that scatterometer and SSM/I data complement each other in this purpose: that scatterometer data can provide motion vectors in areas where passive data has difficulties and vice versa. Ice motion vectors are derived from sensor images using wavelet techniques.

Two product types are available: postscript images of the ice motion and self-describing ascii files describing the ice motion vectors. For distribution, product files are collected in tar files containing two months of data. The general file name is of the form merged_*_YYMMNN.tar where YY is the two digit year, MM is the two digit number of the start month, and NN is the two digit number of the stop month. For more specifics regarding this product, contact Antony Liu.