An FEC codeword comprises channel information indicating the reliability of the information contained by the FEC codeword. The channel information can be used to generate an initial error channel estimate. Based on the initial error channel estimate, an FEC decoder can decode the FEC codeword to increase the reliability of the information contained by the FEC codeword. According to the present disclosure, a method and system of decoding comprises: comparing a current codeword to a previous codeword in order to identify bits corrected between the previous and current codewords; revising an error channel estimate based on the identified corrected bits, the revised estimate representing a change in the error channel over time; and decoding the codeword based on the revised error channel estimate.