NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC)
Enabling researchers and data users to better understand how changes in the cryosphere impact our planet.
Catch up on news and stories about how NSIDC DAAC data are being used in research, as well as spotlights on how you can use the data, tools and resources we offer. If you are using NSIDC DAAC data in your research, teaching, or some other way, let us know and we may feature your work in our next article. Share your story with us today.
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All the data in the world does little good if scientists cannot access it. For more than twenty-five years, NSIDC has provided open access data, data that are freely and publicly distributed from its Web site, from various remote sensing and field missions.
If you live in, work in, or study the Arctic, you may have noted firsthand the evidence of warming felt more strongly there than in most other places on Earth. Arctic amplification is the outsized warming in the Arctic, and climate scientists predicted this change as global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rise.
NSIDC scientists recently recorded the lowest temperatures on Earth at a desolate and remote ice plateau in East Antarctica, trumping a record set in 1983 and uncovering a new puzzle about the ice-covered continent.
NASA has selected the University of Colorado Boulder for the management and operations of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System Snow and Ice Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC). Under the contract, valued at about $42 million
NSIDC scientist Walt Meier, who studies the yearly waxing and waning of sea ice in the Arctic, said the old film from one of the first U.S. Earth-observing missions, the NASA Nimbus 1 satellite, could give scientists a deeper look back at climate.
Perhaps the longest and most consistent series of satellites is Landsat, and early next year a new Landsat will fly. This new eye in the sky promises not just to keep the record going, but to provide more detail on Earth’s forests, oceans, croplands, savannahs, snow, ice, and more.