• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.687-701
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• 2014

Sea ice is generally accepted as an important factor to understand the process of earth climate changes and is the basis of earth system models for analysis and prediction of the climate changes. To continuously monitor sea ice changes at kilometer scale, it is demanded to create more accurate grid data from the current, limited sea ice data. In this paper we described a downscaling method for Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) Sea Ice Concentration (SIC) from 10 km to 1 km resolution using a weighting scheme of sea ice days ratio derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sea ice cover product that has a high correlation with the SIC. In a case study for Okhotsk Sea, the sea ice areas of both data (before and after downscaling) were identical, and the monthly means and standard deviations of SIC exhibited almost the same values. Also, Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analyses showed that three kinds of SIC data (ERA-Interim, original AMSR2, and downscaled AMSR2) had very similar principal components for spatial and temporal variations. Our method can apply to downscaling of other continuous variables in the form of ratio such as percentage and can contribute to monitoring small-scale changes of sea ice by providing finer SIC data.