Data Announcements

Great news! The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the Analog Archives collection a Preservation Assistance Grant for Smaller Institutions. This award will fund a contract with a preservation consultant to conduct a general preservation assessment of the collections.

GEOportal permits users to benefit from the GEOSS by accessing a variety of Earth Observation data, information and services via a single portal. To read the NOAA@NSIDC entries, click on the sun icons near the Arctic.

Sea Ice Charts of the Russian Arctic in Gridded Format, 1933-2006 These newly-published data, from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, are an important new data source for those studying the role of sea ice in climate change.

The Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment (AIDJEX) AIDJEX was a pioneering experiment that in the mid 1970s provided answers to emerging questions about how sea ice moves and changes in response to the influence of ocean and atmosphere. See the new AIDJEX page for links to a photo gallery, related material, and to a new retrospective on the experiment by Norbert Untersteiner, AIDJEX Project Director, 1971-1977.

Sea Ice Index In the News Sea Ice Index graphics and numbers figured prominently in coverage of this year's record sea ice extent minimum. The Index Web site had more than 135,000 hits from more than 9000 distinct users in the month of September alone.

NSIDC is pleased to announce updates to the Glacier Photograph Collection. More than 1,200 photographs of Greenland glaciers have been digitized from slides and are available online for viewing and downloading. The Greenland photograph collection was donated to the World Data Center for Glaciology, Boulder in the mid 1980s by Captain Ron Kollmeyer of the U.S. Coast Guard. Captain Kollmeyer was the lead for the Greenland Glacier Survey.

Sea ice animations are now available in the data set catalog of NOAA@NSIDC's Science On a Sphere. Animations of sea ice concentration show the annual cycle and give some idea of its variability, while a series of September monthly means from 1987 on highlights the change in the annual Arctic minimum sea ice extent through time.

The Sea Ice Index pages have been redesigned so that graphs and images are easier to find. Thumbnails now take users to the Web Image Spreadsheet Tool (WIST), where one can quickly compare images from different time periods. GIS compatible files (shapefiles) of monthly ice coverage are now available as well.

National Ice Center Arctic Sea Ice Charts and Climatologies in Gridded Format can now be easily browsed. Using a using a Web Image Spreadsheet Tool (WIST), one can quickly compare (visually) different time periods and products. Click on Browse Images at the top of the product site to see how it works. Use the drop down menus to change the number of rows and columns, and the chart products and time period being displayed.

More Online Glacier Photographs Today's update to the online collection includes 50 photographs taken between 1890 and 1996. Represented in this batch are Colorado glacier photographs taken by Junius Henderson, Oscar A. Randolph, Rudolph Johnson, and Russell Allen. The glaciers are Andrews, Arapaho, Fair, Isabel, Mills, Saint Vrain and Taylor. Other photos include a series of Franz Josef Glacier (1951-1964), and Harry Fielding Reid images of John Muir's cabin taken in 1890.

AMSR/ADEOS-II L1A version 2 data are now available from NSIDC. The data are available from 28 January until 24 October 2003, when the satellite was lost.

The World Glacier Inventory has recently been updated. Over 1,600 glaciers from the former Soviet Union were added and errors with 368 glacier IDs were identified and corrected. For more information, please see the "Quality Assessment and History of Updates" section in the data set "Documentation" for further details about these updates.

March through August Ice Edge Positions in the Nordic Seas, 1750-2002 Ice edge positions come from ship logbooks, diaries, and other sources, in addition to more recent satellite data products. Data are available as ASCII text, browse images, and as shapefiles (GIS format). This long record sheds light on ice edge variability through regional shifts in climate.

NSIDC's latest KML file is included in the Google Earth Outreach Environment and Science Showcase. It includes a Sea Ice Index animation, Repeat Photography of Glaciers, and an Antarctic ice shelf break-up animation.

Keep up with new data releases using the NOAA@NSIDC team's GeoRSS feed. Project manager Lisa Ballagh gave a talk on "Communicating Scientific Buzz with GeoRSS" at the Fifth International Symposium on Digital Earth, San Francisco, 5-9 June.

The Special Libraries Association conference in Denver had a session on "Resources for the International Polar Year" at which Ruth Duerr spoke on Discovery and Access of Historic Literature from the IPYs (DAHLI). Duerr and NSIDC archivist and librarian Allaina Howard lead the project, which is partially supported by the NOAA@NSIDC Climate Database Modernization Program. Howard presented a paper on Tracking Climate Change in the 21st Century: Supporting Research with Historic Photographs and Google Earth>.

Good Days on the Trail was shown as part of the University of Colorado International Film Series. The film, with color footage of CU students on alpine hikes, provides a glimpse into the mountaineering lifestyle of an earlier time, along with shots of Arapaho Glacier and other Front Range glaciers. Scientists from NSIDC and the CU Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research narrated. The film is being preserved and digitized with support from the NOAA@NSIDC National Geophysical Data Center and the Climate Database Modernization Program.

The Sea Ice Index viewed using Google Earth illustrated "Perspectives on the Arctic's Shrinking Sea-Ice Cover": a review article in Vol. 315 of Science. The data product had more than 47,000 distinct users in 2006 (summed monthly) and currently averages over 6000 users each month.

The Glacier Photograph Collection is an exceedingly popular part of our data portfolio. Allaina Howard's role in developing this and other analog collections was recognized by NSIDC's parent organization, CIRES.

CADIS is one of several proposals to support IPY data management. It is focused on the Arctic Observing Network and Study of Environmental Arctic Change science programs and funded by NSF. The project is a joint effort of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and NSIDC. NOAA@NSIDC's Florence Fetterer is the NSIDC lead.