Sea Ice Trends and Climatologies from SMMR and SSM/I-SSMIS, Version 2
Data set id:
NSIDC-0192
DOI: 10.5067/EYICLBOAAJOU
There is a more recent version of these data.
Version Summary

  • Extended the temporal coverage of the data to December 2015.

  • Updated the data with input data from the Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Passive Microwave Data data set.

  • Updated the data with input data from the Polar Stereographic Valid Ice Masks Derived from National Ice Center Monthly Sea Ice Climatologies data set.

  • Made improvements to the browse images.

Overview

NSIDC provides this data set to aid in the investigations of the variability and trends of sea ice cover. Ice cover in these data are indicated by sea ice concentration: the percentage of the ocean surface covered by ice. The ice-covered area indicates how much ice is present; it is the total area of a pixel multiplied by the ice concentration in that pixel. Ice persistence is the percentage of months over the data set time period that ice existed at a location. The ice-extent indicates whether ice is present; here, ice is considered to exist in a pixel if the sea ice concentration exceeds 15 percent. This data set provides users with data about total ice-covered areas, sea ice extent, ice persistence, and monthly climatologies of sea ice concentrations.
Parameter(s):
ICE EXTENTSEA ICE CONCENTRATION
Platform(s):
DMSP 5D-2/F11, DMSP 5D-2/F13, DMSP 5D-2/F15, DMSP 5D-2/F8, DMSP 5D-3/F17, Nimbus-5, Nimbus-7
Sensor(s):
ESMR, SMMR, SSM/I, SSMIS
Data Format(s):
PNG, Binary, JPEG, ASCII
Temporal Coverage:
26 October 1978 to 31 December 2015
Temporal Resolution:
Not Specified
Spatial Resolution:
  • 25 km
  • 25 km
Spatial Coverage:
N:
90
S:
30.98
E:
180
W:
-180
N:
-39.23
S:
-90
E:
180
W:
-180
Blue outlined yellow areas on the map below indicate the spatial coverage for this data set.

Data Access & Tools

This data set has been retired. There is a more recent version of these data.

Help Articles

General Questions & FAQs

NSIDC currently archives passive microwave sea ice concentration products based on two algorithms: the NASA Team algorithm and the Bootstrap algorithm. Both algorithms were developed by researchers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1980s.

How to Articles

The following are instructions describing how to import sea ice binary files into ArcGIS. These instructions were tested with ArcMap 10.5 and 10.6.
Data from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) can be accessed directly from our HTTPS file system. We provide basic command line Wget and curl instructions for HTTPS file system downloads below.