Defining a Sea Ice Flag for Envisat Altimetry Mission

This letter presents the development of a sea ice flag algorithm for the Envisat altimetry mission to detect sea ice corrupted sea surface height data within quality control processing. The algorithm takes advantage of having both passive and active microwave sensors on the same platform with coregistered measurements. Its performances have been evaluated based on collocations between the along-track Envisat data with reference maps built from combination of daily grids of sea ice concentration from SSM/I sensors and backscatter cross section from SeaWinds scatterometer on QuikSCAT satellite.