Change Date: 8 Aug 2025, 4:48 p.m.
floating_ice_area_fraction 1 A variable with this standard name represents the fractional area of some region of earth's surface covered by floating ice, including frozen sea water, frozen lake water, and calved land ice. It may be expressed as a fraction, a percentage, or any other dimensionless representation of a fraction. In general, for a grid cell, an area fraction is evaluated as the area of interest in the cell divided by the grid cell area, or if the cell_methods restricts the evaluation to some portion of that grid cell (e.g. "where sea or lake"), then it is the area of interest divided by the area of the identified portion. Consequently, a variable with a standard name of floating_ice_area_fraction and a cell_methods attribute that includes "area:mean where sea or lake" represents what is defined as the "floating-ice concentration": the area fraction of the sea or lake surface that is covered by floating ice. Except when the concentration is 0, the floating ice area fraction and the floating-ice concentration will differ in grid cells that are partly sea or lake, e.g. in coastal grid cells.