• NSIDC DAAC is currently upgrading our data ingest process for NASA Earthdata Cloud. During this transition, users may notice temporary interruptions in data availability or notice small data gaps. All gaps will be resolved as quickly as possible. During this upgrade jpeg browse imagery will also not be available for preview in Earthdata search. Please reach out to NSIDC User Services with any questions or concerns.

MEaSUREs Greenland Ice Velocity: Selected Glacier Site Velocity Maps from Optical Images, Version 3
Data set id:
NSIDC-0646
DOI: 10.5067/RRFY5IW94X5W
This is the most recent version of these data.
Version Summary
Changes in Version 3 apply only to data from 01 January 2016 to the present; data files prior to 2016 are identical to Version 2.1.
• This update utilizes a new feature tracking algorithm within the Surface Extraction through TIN Searchspace Minimization (SETSM) software package, adopted because it is open source and optimized for high-performance computing environments.
• This update only uses Landsat 8 OLI imagery
• For data from 01 January 2016 onwards there is one additional geoTIFF available for velocity magnitude, (vv).

Overview

This data set, part of the NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, consists of mean monthly velocity maps for selected glacier outlet areas. The maps are generated by tracking visible features between optical image pairs acquired by the Landsat 4 and 5 Thematic Mapper (TM), the Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), and the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). See Greenland Ice Mapping Project (GIMP) for related data.
Parameter(s):
ICE VELOCITY
Platform(s):
LANDSAT-4
LANDSAT-5
LANDSAT-7
LANDSAT-8
Terra
Sensor(s):
ASTER
ETM+
OLI
TM
Data Format(s):
GeoTIFF
Shapefile
Temporal Coverage:
  • 1 March 1985 to 30 November 2021
Temporal Resolution:
  • 1 month
Spatial Resolution:
  • 100 m
  • 100 m
Spatial Reference System(s):
  • WGS 84 / NSIDC Sea Ice Polar Stereographic North
    EPSG:3413
Spatial Coverage:
  • N:
    82
    S:
    60
    E:
    -20
    W:
    -70
Blue outlined yellow areas on the map below indicate the spatial coverage for this data set.

Data Access & Tools

A free NASA Earthdata Login account is required to access these data. Learn More

Sample Data Image

Image
Gridded spatial coverage map

This gridded spatial coverage map shows ice velocity, measured in meters per year, from 1 August 2015 to 1 September 2015 for the grid E68.05N, which contains the Hutchinson Glacier. Lowest ice velocities are shown in dark blue, and highest velocities are shown in yellow. Credit: NASA MEaSUREs Grimp Data: NASA, USGS

Help Articles

General Questions & FAQs

This article covers frequently asked questions about the NASA NSIDC DAAC's Earthdata cloud migration project and what it means to data users.

How to Articles

This article shows how to download NSIDC DAAC data from NASA Earthdata Cloud to your computer using three tools: wget and curl—popular command-line utilities for downloading files—and Data Downloader, a Python-based command-line tool developed by the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archi
Many NSIDC DAAC data sets can be accessed using NSIDC DAAC's Data Access Tool. This tool provides the ability to search and filter data with spatial and temporal constraints using a map-based interface.Users have the option to:
Below the image in this article, you will find sample code in IDL, MATLAB, and Python to read in a GeoTIFF file, extract the metadata, and create an image. The code has been tested with the following data products:
We recommend using the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) to convert GeoTIFF files into a different format.
We recommend using the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) or a GIS to reproject geoTIFF files.
The NASA Earthdata Cloud is the NASA cloud-based archive of Earth observations. It is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Learn how to find and access NSIDC DAAC data directly in the cloud.