Service Interruption

Welcome to the Beta Version of A-CAP: The Antarctic Cryosphere Access Portal

Release Date: July 25, 2008

A beta version, or prototype, of the Antarctic Cryosphere Access Portal (A-CAP) (http://nsidc.org/agdc/acap/) has been released for public use. Developed at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) Antarctic Glaciological Data Center (AGDC), A-CAP aims to be a geo-visualization and data download tool for AGDC data and other Antarctic-wide parameters, including glaciology, ice core data, snow accumulation, satellite imagery, digital elevation models (DEMs), sea ice concentration, and many other cryosphere-related scientific measurements. The user can zoom in to a specific region as well as overlay coastlines, placenames, latitude/longitude, and other geographic information.

Example map images produced with A-CAP Beta.

In addition to providing an interactive Web interface, customizable A-CAP map images and source data are also accessible via the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS). For more details and instructions for accessing these OGC services, click here. These international specifications provide an interoperable framework for sharing maps and geospatial data over the Internet, enabling remote access through OGC-compliant software applications such as ArcGIS, Google Earth, ENVI, and many others.

In its current beta form, A-CAP does do the following:

Provide WMS, WFS, and WCS OGC services.
Interactively view one or more layers from a variety of overlays, basemaps, and sea ice climatologies. The available basemaps thus far focus on satellite imagery, DEMs, and snow accumulation.
View a map legend, reference map, and scale bar.
Zoom in/out and recenter the map.
Adjust a variety of map parameters, such as the map size, map center, map extent, and background color.
Save the displayed map as an image file by right-clicking on the map.
Obtain citation and background information for each layer, including links to further documentation and data access.

Here is an idea of some of the things we hope A-CAP will do in the future (NOTE: this is not a comprehensive list):

Save the displayed map as a GeoTIFF file.
Download the source data for each of the layers displayed in the map. This dialog will likely include options for data format, map projection, and subsetting to the current map view.
Click on the map to get the data values for that location.
Dynamically view the location of the cursor as you scroll over the map image.
Zoom to your spatial area of interest by drawing a rectangle on the map.
Image buttons, or clickable icons, for common functions such as zoom, recenter, query, view map legend, download data, etc.
Many more data sets will be added to the site as they are prepared, especially including those in AGDC's Data Catalog.

We welcome your feedback on this project. If you have questions, comments or suggestions, please contact the A-CAP Team. A-CAP is developed using MapServer, an Open Source development environment for building spatially-enabled Internet applications.

Future updates will continue to be announced on this RSS feed.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center

Supporting Cryospheric Research Since 1976
449 UCB University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0449

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)