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Looking for facts and information? See About the Cryosphere.
On Thin Ice:
Expedition to a Crumbling Ice Shelf
Scientists blog from Antarctica and provide a glimpse of what it's like to do research in the field. Read their blog ...
Current Conditions
Icelights: Answers to your burning questions about ice and climate
What's hot in the news around climate and sea ice and what are scientists talking about now? Read more...
What is the Cryosphere?
When scientists talk about the cryosphere, they mean the places on Earth where water is in its solid form, frozen into ice or snow. Read more ...
NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) at NSIDC
NASA's Aquarius Microwave Radiometers & Scatterometer
The NSIDC DAAC Aquarius collection includes global gridded soil moisture data and additional polar gridded products. These data products are derived from observations by the Aquarius microwave radiometers and scatterometer on the joint U.S./Argentinian Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC-D) platform. The Aquarius/Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC)-D mission collected observations between August 25, 2011 and June 7, 2015. On June 8, 2015, a power failure on the SAC-D spacecraft ended the mission's observations.
Aquarius employed the first ever combination of passive (radiometer) and active (radar) measurements at L-band (1 to 2 gigahertz in the radio spectrum).
The mission's primary science objective was to demonstrate accurate remote sensing of sea surface salinity. However, research teams built upon the mission’s capabilities to extract additional data including the Level-2 and Level-3 products hosted by the NSIDC DAAC.
NSIDC DAAC Aquarius soil moisture data products were produced by a NASA-funded team at the U.S. Department of Agriculture that developed a technique to derive soil moisture data from Aquarius observations. Aquarius soil moisture data have enabled scientists to:
The NSIDC DAAC Aquarius collection also includes the following polar-gridded products derived from Aquarius data:
The Aquarius/SAC-D mission was a collaboration between NASA and the Argentinian space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE). Brazil, Canada, France, and Italy also contributed to the mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center jointly built the instrument.
Soil moisture, brightness temperature, freeze/thaw, ice fraction, salinity
Global
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