Evaluation of SSM/I-derived sea ice concentrations with AVHRR imagery

Sea ice concentration fields from several different passive microwave algorithms are compared with AVHRR visible and infrared imagery. AVHRR imagery is obtained over a several month period for the Barents Sea, East Greenland Sea, and Baffin Bay regions. These encompass a variety of different ice and weather conditions; in this paper, only the East Greenland Sea region is presented. Of the algorithms evaluated, the NASA Team 2 algorithm appears to perform the best, with a lower bias and lower RMS difference when compared to AVHRR concentrations, especially in regions of thin ice. The Cal/Val performs well in thin ice, but overestimates thicker ice concentrations. The NASA Team and Bootstrap tend to overestimate concentration near the ice edge, but underestimate it within the ice pack.