Sea ice concentration

Distribution of sea ice concentration around the Antarctic Continent derived from AMSR simulated data. The effects of global warming should appear in terms of variations in sea ice cover in the polar regions. Since microwave imaging techniques do not depend on sunlight, they have the advantage of being able to observe the polar regions through long polar nights and heavy cloud cover. In boreal seas such as the Arctic Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk, a potential data application is to find proper shipping routes by predicting the ice condition. The higher spatial resolution of AMSR would be very useful for this kind of application.