Data Announcements

NSIDC is pleased to announce that sea ice concentrations from AMSR-E/Aqua Daily L3 12.5 km Brightness Temperatures, Sea Ice Concentration, and Snow Depth Polar Grids (AE_SI12) were created as .kml files for use in Earth browsers, such as Google Earth. These files include the latest 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day animations of the daily sea ice concentrations and sea ice extent in the Arctic.

Bruce Raup and Roger Barry of NSIDC attended a Workshop on the World Glacier Inventory, organized by the International Glaciological Society in Lanzhou, China, Sep 21-24. Bruce Raup presented papers on the status Global Land Ice Measurement from Space (GLIMS) project at NSIDC that now holds about 82,000 glacier outlines. The meeting established an ad hoc committee chaired by Roger Barry to develop guidelines for the timely completion of the World Glacier Inventory (WGI), begun in 1978, which now contains nearly two thirds of the estimated 160,000 glaciers in the world.

Reprocessing is underway for all AMSR-E Level 3 sea ice products with data from 19 June 2002, the start of the AMSR-E mission, and will continue through 5 July 2008.

Release-28 data for the Laser 2C time period (18 May 2004 to 21 June 2004) are available for the following products: GLA01 to GLA09 and GLA12 to GLA15. This is the first public release of Laser 2C data.

Due to an error in an ancillary data file, the following Version 2 AMSR-E Level 3 snow products were removed from NSIDC's archives: AMSR-E/Aqua Daily L3 Global Snow Water Equivalent EASE-Grids (AE_DySno); AMSR-E/Aqua 5-Day L3 Global Snow Water Equivalent EASE-Grids (AE_5DySno); AMSR-E/Aqua Monthly L3 Global Snow Water Equivalent EASE-Grids (AE_MoSno).

As of 06 July 2008, Version 2 of AMSR-E Level 3 land, rain, ocean, snow, and sea ice products are now available at NSIDC, and are considered Transitional (T) or Validated (V).

Arctic Sea Ice Melt Pond Statistics and Maps, 1999, 2000, and 2001 This data set includes pond coverage and size statistics from 1 meter visible band imagery. Surface type maps with either two (water and ice) or three (pond, open water, and ice) classes were created using supervised maximum likelihood classification. The satellite imagery was acquired over four Arctic Ocean sites, three in 1999.

Release-28 data for the Laser 3J time period (17 February 2008 to 21 March 2008) are available for the following products: GLA01 to GLA09 and GLA12 to GLA15. This is the first public release of Laser 3J data.

The Sea Ice Edge Location and Extent in the Russian Arctic, 1933-2006 data set is now available. The data are derived from sea ice charts from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI), St. Petersburg, Russia. The data set consists of edge locations and monthly and seasonal mean sea ice extents for each of the marginal seas in the Russian Arctic. The Sea Ice Index is the basis of a new module in Windows to the Universe.

The Annual State of the Climate Report This report from the American Meteorological Society is now available. Chapter 5, The Poles, summarizes the the 2007 climate of Antarctica and the Arctic relative to years past. This report is translated into other languages and distributed to all 187 World Meteorological Organization member nations.

NSIDC has recently updated the Sea Ice Trends and Climatologies from SMMR and SSM/I data products.

Data are now available through December 2007 for the Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I Passive Microwave data set.

Reprocessed Release-28 data are now available for the Laser 1A time period (20 February 2003 to 21 March 2003) for the products GLA05-GLA09 and GLA12-GLA15. Previously these data were released as 228 in the new file naming convention, but they have now been processed to the highest level of processing at 428.

Daily plots of sea ice extent are now available from the Sea Ice Index Web site.

Michael Zemp, from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, is visiting NSIDC for three months. Michael will help us improve the quality of the records in the World Glacier Inventory.

The Central Asia Temperature and Precipitation Data, 1879-2003 data set is now available. This data set expands the NOAA@NSIDC Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) of quality controlled meteorological records. Records are from 298 stations in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Data were subjected to rigorous quality control and homogeneity assessment procedures, consistent with those used for the GHCN.

Over 1,300 glacier photographs taken between 1957 and 1959 as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) are now available from NSIDC. This special collection, the DAHLI IGY Glacier Photographs, is part of the Glacier Photograph Collection.

The Sea Ice Index is the basis of a new module in Windows to the Universe

The National Park Service Glacier Survey reports covering the years 1932-1952, and 79 glacier photos from Peru taken in the 1950s by Fred D. Ayres were added to the Glacier Photograph Collection.

For more information, please see the Quality Assessment and History of Updates section of the data set documentation. To access the new data from this update, proceed to the World Glacier Inventory search page and select "CAREERI, Lanzhou, China. Che/Wu" from the Data Contributor pull-down menu.