ArcLeads: Daily sea-ice lead maps for the Arctic, 2002-2021, NOV-APR

The presence of sea-ice leads represents a key feature of the Arctic sea ice cover. Leads promote the flux of sensible and latent heat from the ocean to the cold winter atmosphere and are thereby crucial for air-sea-ice-ocean interactions. Especially in light of the observed trends in Arctic sea-ice extent, and with respect to the projected future changes in the Arctic climate system , the structure and dynamics of leads represent essential information for global change monitoring. We here present daily lead maps for the Arctic, for winter months NOV-APR in the period 2002-2021. The data were derived from MODIS thermal infrared imagery with 1 km² spatial resolution (Reiser et al., 2020). The ArcLeads data set contains daily categorical lead maps including classes for sea ice, leads, clouds and artefacts. The data come in EPSG:3413 (subset) projection and are provided as annual NetCDF files each including lat/lon grids. This is an update to the dataset provided in https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.917588.