Data Announcements

If you are interested in Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) data, we would like to bring your attention to an upcoming webinar series offered by the NASA Applied Remote Sensing Training (ARSET) Program that is focused on applications of SMAP and evapotranspiration data. This webinar series will help attendees learn about NASA soil moisture and evapotranspiration products and how to access and apply them for water resource management.

NOAA@NSIDC is pleased to announce the addition of 1,173 photographs to the Glacier Photograph Collection. This addition is a special collection that contains photographs of glaciers in and around the Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska, USA. The collection was compiled by a Natural Resource Specialist Intern in the GeoSpatial Services Department at Saint Mary's University, MN.

The NASA IceBridge MCoRDS L1B Geolocated Radar Echo Strength Profiles, Version 2 data set now includes data for the 2015 Arctic campaign. This data set contains radar echograms taken from the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) ultra Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder (MCoRDS) over land and sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. Data set DOI: https://doi.org/10.5067/90S1XZRBAX5N

  By Laura Naranjo In 1972, astronauts aboard the NASA Apollo 17 spacecraft snapped the first full-view image of Earth. The iconic photo was later dubbed “The Blue Marble.” Since then, NASA has sent an array of missions into space aimed at understanding life on Earth. Massive streams of data are now available, documenting everything from drought to hurricanes to plankton blooms. With such a wealth of data, how can scientists get a quicker look at what’s happening on Earth? Downloading and mapping data can be a very technical and time-consuming project.

NASA IceBridge POS/AV L1B Corrected Position and Attitude Data for the 2016 Greenland campaign are now available from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC). This data set contains georeferencing data from the Applanix 510 POS AV system flown with the Digital Mapping System (DMS) and other instruments over Greenland and Antarctica. Data set DOI: https://doi.org/10.5067/XILTNL9F1HCR

NASA IceBridge MCoRDS L2 Ice Thickness data for 2015 Greenland are now available from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC). This data set contains depth sounder measurements of elevation, surface, bottom, and thickness for Greenland and Antarctica taken from the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder (MCoRDS). Data Set DOI: https://doi.org/10.5067/GDQ0CUCVTE2Q.

The final four MODIS snow cover data sets are now available in Version 6 at the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC): MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 8-Day L3 Global 0.05Deg CMG (MOD10C2). DOI: 10.5067/MODIS/MOD10C2.006 MODIS/Aqua Snow Cover 8-Day L3 Global 0.05Deg CMG (MYD10C2).

NASA IceBridge DMS L0 Raw Imagery for 2016 Greenland are now available from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC). This data set contains level zero imagery taken from the Digital Mapping System (DMS) over Antarctica and Greenland. Data Set DOI: https://doi.org/10.5067/UMFN22VHGGMH

Until now, climate diagnostic applications, reanalyses, and atmospheric modeling studies that needed a lower boundary condition did not have an Arctic-wide gridded ice concentration data set to use based on observations and one that extends back as far as the mid-nineteenth century. Gridded Monthly Sea Ice Extent and Concentration, 1850 Onward addresses this need by improving and extending the Arctic and Southern Ocean Sea Ice Concentrations product.

NOAA@NSIDC is pleased to announce the release of Sea Ice Index Version 2. Improvements include using the most recently available version of the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) input sea ice concentration data and revising three computations in the Sea Ice Index processing code. The new GSFC data have undergone additional manual quality control procedures at the GSFC that go farther to remove spurious ice.

The Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic project at the National Snow and Ice Data Center is pleased to announce the release of a website focused on the cultural and ecological significance of the northern Bering Sea.

The NASA IceBridge ATM L4 Surface Elevation Rate of Change data set now includes measurements based on 2015 data. This data set contains surface elevation rate of change measurements derived from IceBridge and Pre-IceBridge Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) widescan elevation measurements data (ILATM1B) for Arctic and Antarctica missions flown under NASA's Operation IceBridge (OIB) and Arctic Ice Mapping (AIM) projects. Data Set DOI: https://doi.org/10.5067/BCW6CI3TXOCY

NASA IceBridge LVIS L1B Geolocated Return Energy Waveforms data for 2015 Antarctica are now available from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC). This data set contains laser altimetry return energy waveform measurements taken from NASA's Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) over areas including Greenland and Antarctica. Data Set DOI: https://doi.org/10.5067/RDT1MZVS0VG9

An improved version of the Sea Ice Index is coming. On Wednesday, 6 July 2016, Sea Ice Index Version 2 will be released. It will look and act the same as Version 1, but will have updated processing code and will use a new version of the input data. Because of these updates, minor changes in some of the ice extent and area numbers will be seen. These will be clearly described in the documentation, which will also be updated on 6 July. We are alerting users to this impending update because file names will change.

The SMAP Science Data System (SDS) has completed reprocessing of the NASA SMAP Level-1B, -1C, -2, and -3 data products to Validated Version 3. Additionally, SMAP Level-4 products have been reprocessed to Validated Version 2. During reprocessing, Level-1B, -1C, -2 and -3 data spanning the time period 19 November 2015 to 02 February 2016 were regenerated and replaced due to an issue with a spacecraft ancillary input file. The affected files end with R13080_001.h5.

NASA IceBridge Sea Ice Freeboard, Snow Depth, and Thickness Quick Look data for the 19 April 2016 to 04 May 2016 are now available at the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC). This data set is an evaluation product containing derived geophysical data products retrieved over the Arctic sea ice cover from 2012 to 2016 using the IceBridge Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM), Snow Radar, Digital Mapping System (DMS), and KT19 pyrometer.

NASA IceBridge POS/AV L1B Corrected Position and Attitude Data for the Fall 2015 Arctic campaign and the 2015 Antarctica campaign are now available from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC). This data set contains georeferencing data from the Applanix 510 POS AV system flown with the Digital Mapping System (DMS) and other instruments over Greenland and Antarctica. Data set DOI: https://doi.org/10.5067/XILTNL9F1HCR

The NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) has updated the Near-Real-Time DMSP SSMIS Daily Polar Gridded Brightness Temperatures data set so that it now solely provides data from the DMSP-F18 SSMIS sensor beginning with 01 April 2016 due to the compromised data integrity of the DMSP-F17 SSMIS vertically polarized 37 GHz channel (37V). Data before 01 April 2016 are still from the F17 SSMIS.

The NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) has completed investigating calibration of data from the DMSP-F18 SSMIS sensor for the Near-Real-Time DMSP SSMIS Daily Polar Gridded Sea Ice Concentration data set. The tie points used with F17 SSMIS data provided the best match in sea ice extent, so no adjustment to the tie points were made for F18. The average difference between F17- and F18-derived sea ice extents were approximately 20,000 sq km.

On 05 April 2016, the vertically polarized 37 GHz (37V) channel of the SSMIS instrument on the DMSP-F17 satellite began yielding compromised brightness temperature data. This channel is one of those used to estimate sea ice concentration shown in the Sea Ice Index, so data processing was temporarily suspended. NOAA@NSIDC is pleased to announce that, today, Sea Ice Index processing has resumed and the time series now uses the SSMIS instrument on the DMSP-F18 satellite beginning 01 April 2016.