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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
Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS) Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS)
TOVS browse image displaying Temperature at 70 Mb, one of the many variables of the TOVS Pathfinder Path-P Daily Arctic Gridded Atmospheric Parameters data set. Image courtesy of NSIDC.
NSIDC archives and distributes daily and monthly 100 km-resolution data files in Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) from the TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) experiments. In addition, TOVS data are featured in the Polar Pathfinder Sampler, a CD-ROM product designed to illustrate the ease with which parameters across Polar Pathfinder data sets may be compared. The Polar Pathfinder program incorporates data from TOVS, the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR), and the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I). For more information about the program, visit the NOAA/NASA Polar Pathfinder Web site.
Spanning over twenty years and across both hemispheres, the TOVS data record provides excellent spatial and temporal coverage for stratospheric studies. The TOVS suite of instruments measured a variety of parameters ideal for weather forecasting, such as polar temperature, humidity and temperature profiles, total ozone, and clouds and radiation on a global scale.
NOAA/NASA Polar Pathfinder Data at NSIDC
Access to all NOAA/NASA Polar Pathfinder data sets
NOAA TOVS Web site
Information regarding the TOVS suite of instruments at NOAA's Stratospheric Ozone Web site
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