Name: MEaSUREs Greenland Ice Velocity: Selected Glacier Site Velocity Maps from InSAR, Version 2
Creator: National Snow and Ice Data Center
Keywords: ICE VELOCITY

MEaSUREs Greenland Ice Velocity: Selected Glacier Site Velocity Maps from InSAR, Version 2

Data set id:

NSIDC-0481

DOI: 10.5067/JQHJUOYCF2TE

Data Citation and Acknowledgment
As a condition of using these data, you must cite the use of this data set. Such a practice gives credit to data set producers and advances principles of transparency and reproducibility.

Joughin, I., Howat, I., Smith, B. & Scambos, T. (2020). MEaSUREs Greenland Ice Velocity: Selected Glacier Site Velocity Maps from InSAR. (NSIDC-0481, Version 2). [Data Set]. Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/JQHJUOYCF2TE. [describe subset used if applicable]. Date Accessed 09-29-2025.

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Other standard citation formats may be found on the DOI Citation Formatter website (paste 10.5067/JQHJUOYCF2TE into the top form field).

Describing subset: When applicable, include the information a reader would need to extract the same subset at the end of your citation. If multiple or complex steps were incolved, it may be more appropriate to include this information in the paper itself.

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Literature references: Please include the following literature citations in addition to the data citation above:

Joughin, I., Smith, B., Howat, I., Scambos, T. & Moon, T.. 2010. Greenland Flow Variability from Ice-Sheet-Wide Velocity Mapping. Journal of Glaciology. 56. DOI: 10.3189/002214310792447734.

There is a more recent version of these data.
Version Summary

1. Full reprocessing with accumulated minor updates. Output should be generally consistent with previous versions.
2. The tiffs are now cloud optimized and include scale-down by 2 and 4 pyramids.
3. Velocity magnitude is now included as a separate tiff to be consistent with other velocity products (so now there are vx, vy, and vv tiffs).
4. Correction of browse images (distortions, color bar placement, watermark, and color-scale consistency.)
5. Addition of consistent NoData values
6. Temporal coverage was extended.

Overview

This data set, part of the NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, provides velocity estimates determined from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data for major glacier outlet areas in Greenland, some of which have shown profound velocity changes over the MEaSUREs observation period. The InSAR Selected Glacier Site Velocity Maps are produced from image pairs measured by the German Aerospace Center's (DLR) twin satellites TerraSAR-X / TanDEM-X (TSX / TDX). The measurements in this data set are provided in addition to the ice sheet-wide data from the related data set, MEaSUREs Greenland Ice Sheet Velocity Map from InSAR Data. See Greenland Ice Mapping Project (GIMP) for more related data.

Parameter(s):

ICE VELOCITY

Platform(s):

TSX

Sensor(s):

X-SAR

Data Format(s):

GeoTIFF

JPEG

Temporal Coverage:

12 June 2008 to 30 June 2020

Temporal Resolution:

11 day

Spatial Resolution:

100 m

100 m

Spatial Reference System(s):

Not Specified

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.

View Metadata Record

Data Access & Tools

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

Documentation

User Guide

MEaSUREs Greenland Ice Velocity: Selected Glacier Site Velocity Maps from InSAR, Version 2 User Guide

ATBDs

Greenland Ice Mapping Project 2 (GIMP-2) Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document

Help Articles

General Questions & FAQs

FAQs About NSIDC DAAC's Earthdata Cloud Migration

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

The NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) is migrating its primary data access from its legacy, on-premises archive to the NASA Earthdata Cloud.

How to Articles

Downloading Data from Earthdata Cloud to Your Local Computer Using the Command Line

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:

How can I use code to read GeoTiffs?

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.

There are external Jupyter notebooks available that can be used to search for GrIMP products and incorporate them into a new QGIS project:

There are external Jupyter notebooks available that can be used to download user-defined spatial subsets of the following MEaSUREs GrIMP products:

NASA Earthdata Cloud Data Access Guide

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.