Help Center

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

Read this help article to learn about what ICESat-2 quick look data products are and how to find them. What are ICESat-2 quick looks? The Advanced Topographic Altimeter System (ATLAS) on board the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) collects elevation data over all surfaces spanning the world’s frozen regions, forests, lakes, urban areas, and more. ICESat-2 data has a standard latency of 30-45 days, meaning it is made available to users 30-45 days after satellite observation.

Many NSIDC DAAC data sets can be accessed using the 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 Download a Python script Place an order to download files Pass their selection through to Earthdata Search to further customize and order there Let's get started with how to use the NSIDC DAAC Data Access Tool.

There are two tricky steps in reading binary data in FORTRAN. First you must open the file with the proper mode, then you must correctly read and interpret the data values. There is no one correct way to do either of these steps. It often takes a fair bit of trial and error to get it right. It is therefore essential that you have test data to read with documented examples of known values.

This article describes how to geolocate North, South, and Global EASE-Grid data from the DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Pathfinder Daily EASE-Grid Brightness Temperatures product using ENVI software. These procedures were tested with ENVI Classic 5.2 on both linux and Windows 7; other versions of ENVI may have slightly different menu options and steps. 

The GoLIVE Map Application allows users to spatially search for and download land ice velocities derived from panchromatic imagery collected from May 2013 to present.

The NSIDC Data Map Services Application Programming Interface (API) provides HTTP URLs for requesting geo-registered map images from NSIDC's geospatial database. A WMS request defines the geographic layer(s) and area of interest to be processed. The response to the request is one geo-registered map image returned as a PNG 24bit, PNG 8bit, GIF, JPEG, or JPEG-PNG that can be displayed in a browser. You can also obtain a Keyhole Markup Language (KML) image to view in Google Earth, and a Geography Markup Language (GML) XML grammar file through a WFS request.

There is considerable overlap of the SMAP radiometer footprints, or Instantaneous Fields of View (IFOVs), which are defined by the contours where the sensitivity of the antenna has fallen by 3db from its maximum. The IFOVs are spaced about 11 km apart in the along scan direction with scan lines spaced about 28 km apart near the sub-satellite track. Thus, by interpolating the values from the nearest 6 IFOVs to each 9 km EASE-Grid 2.0 cell location a product with enhanced detail is possible.

NOHRSC provides/creates the data, we just archive it. If you have questions about the model (such as how it is run) that are not available in the user guide, you have to contact NOHRSC directly.

There are two "tricks" to using this dataset with GMT: reading the data into a GMT grdfile, and knowing the projection to use when plotting data over the gridded image. First, the ASCII files have a 30-line header, then single-digit values all strung together. GMT's xyz2grd command needs the data reformatted a bit to work. This shell script will do it: #!/bin/sh infile=$1 tail +31 $infile | perl -pe 'chomp; s/(.)/$1\n/g' | xyz2grd new_data.txt -Gt.grd -ZBLa -V \ -R-12288000/12288000/-12288000/12288000 -I24000 -F

Learn about the various ways you can find NSIDC DAAC IceBridge data.

First, you can open AMSR-E data automatically with ENVI, which handles the HDF-EOS data format by...

First, the spatial resolution of AMSR/ADEOS-II and AMSR-E/Aqua data doubles the resolution of Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) and Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) data.

OPeNDAP, the Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol, is a NASA community standard DAP that provides a simple way for researchers to access and work with data over the internet. OPeNDAP's client/server software allows users to subset and reformat data using an internet browser, command line interface, or custom user interface such as a C NetCDF or Java NetCDF-compliant data analysis program. With a URL to an OPeNDAP server, users can browse data, perform subset operations, and open data directly in NetCDF-compliant software and tools like Matlab, R, IDL, and Panoply.

We recommend using the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) to convert GeoTIFF files into a different format.

To convert HDF5 files into binary format you will need to use the h5dump utility, which is part of the HDF5 distribution available from the HDF Group. How you install HDF5 depends on your operating system. Full instructions for installing and using h5dump on Mac/Unix and Windows are provided below.

The NSIDC provides Python scripts for reformatting specific NSIDC SMMR-SSM/I-SSMIS data products in polar stereographic projections from NetCDF to binary. This includes NSIDC Brightness Temperature Data Sets (NSIDC-0001 and NSIDC-0080) and NSIDC Sea Ice Concentration Data Sets (NSIDC-0051 and NSIDC-0081).

You will first need to have GDAL installed on your system before proceeding on to the following steps. NSIDC User Services is not able to provide support for installing GDAL, but we have found using a package manager such as MacPorts (https://guide.macports.org/) simplifies the installation process on a Mac. There are additional package managers available for Linux users.

This article describes the use of Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) tools for converting SNODAS binary files to NetCDF or GeoTIFF.

AMSR-E sea ice data sets are provided in the Polar Stereographic projection.