Daily Great Lakes Ice Concentration Data Set Now Available

NOAA@NSIDC is pleased to announce the release of the Daily Great Lakes Ice Concentration, 1973 Onward data set. This data set consists of gridded lake ice concentration for the Laurentian Great Lakes from the NOAA@NSIDC Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL). The data are provided as ASCII text files along with corresponding browse image files in JPEG format beginning in 1973 and going through the present. GLERL produces this product to help researchers and others understand how, when, and where lake ice forms and breaks up. For many years, GLERL has obtained operational ice charts from the Canadian Ice Service and the U.S. National Ice Center. These two ice services make the maps that shipping interests use when navigating the Great Lakes in winter. This data set is the product of a project conducted by NOAA@NSIDC GLERL and the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR) at the University of Michigan. The series of digital operational chart data used in this ice cover database was reprocessed by GLERL to daily frequency and 1.8 km x 1.8 km gridded resolution. The resulting database is easier to work with and better suited for applications like biological research and long-term weather assessment. For more information about this data set and to access these data, please visit the Daily Great Lakes Ice Concentration, 1973 Onward data set landing page. Data Set DOI: https://doi.org/10.7265/krkb-f591