Name: MEaSUREs Greenland Image Mosaics from Sentinel-1A and -1B, Version 3
Creator: National Snow and Ice Data Center
Keywords: RADAR BACKSCATTER

MEaSUREs Greenland Image Mosaics from Sentinel-1A and -1B, Version 3

Data set id:

NSIDC-0723

DOI: 10.5067/J9PKP1B9HX6F

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. (2020). MEaSUREs Greenland Image Mosaics from Sentinel-1A and -1B. (NSIDC-0723, Version 3). [Data Set]. Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/J9PKP1B9HX6F. [describe subset used if applicable]. Date Accessed 09-24-2025.

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Other standard citation formats may be found on the DOI Citation Formatter website (paste 10.5067/J9PKP1B9HX6F 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.

See our Citation Policies for more details about how to structure your data citation.

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

Joughin, I., Smith, B., Howat, I., Moon, T. & Scambos, T.. 2016. A SAR record of early 21st century change in Greenland. Journal of Glaciology. 62. DOI: 10.1017/jog.2016.10.

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

Changes to this version include:
- Data were reprocessed with upgraded software and a revised DEM
- The spatial resolution of the uncalibrated product was improved from 50 to 25 meters
- Two new parameters: (1) a calibrated sigma0 radar backscatter product with a 50 m spatial resolution; and (2) a calibrated and radiometrically terrain-corrected gamma0 radar backscatter product, also at 50 m resolution
- The products have been simplified, with the mosaics merged into a single cloud-optimized GeoTIFF and thus replacing the multiple .tif, .vrt, and .ovr files included in Version 2.
- The temporal coverage was expanded

Overview

This data set, part of the NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, consists of 6-day and 12-day 50 m resolution image mosaics of the Greenland coastline and ice sheet periphery. The mosaics are derived from C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (C-SAR) acquired by the Copernicus Sentinel-1A and -1B imaging satellites starting in January 2015. See Greenland Ice Mapping Project (GIMP) for related data.

Parameter(s):

RADAR BACKSCATTER

Platform(s):

SENTINEL-1A

SENTINEL-1B

Sensor(s):

C-SAR

Data Format(s):

GeoTIFF

JPEG

Shapefile

MOV

Temporal Coverage:

1 January 2015 to present

Temporal Resolution:

6 days to 12 days

Spatial Resolution:

50 m
25 m

50 m
25 m

Spatial Reference System(s):

WGS 84 / NSIDC Sea Ice Polar Stereographic North
EPSG:3413

Spatial Coverage:

N:
84
S:
59
E:
-15
W:
-73

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 Image Mosaics from Sentinel-1A and -1B, Version 3 User Guide

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.