About these images

The Greenland melt images here are updated daily, with a one-day lag. The Daily Melt image (left) shows where the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet showed melt on that day. The Cumulative Melt Days image (right) shows the total number of days that melt occurred, year to date.

Areas along the coast are masked out because the satellite sensor’s resolution is not fine enough to distinguish ice from land when a pixel overlaps the coast. Note that the northeast coast (northern Peary Land and Kronprince Christian Land) is showing erroneous melt pixels. This is a false melt signal from seasonal snow and patchy ice areas, where our method of determining surface melting does not work. This issue does not affect trends for the entire ice sheet. We are working to improve the ice sheet mask.

Learn about update delays. Read about the data and other problems which occasionally occur in near-real-time data.

The daily image update isn’t current; why?
The daily image update is produced from near-real-time operational satellite data, with a data lag of approximately one day. However, visitors may notice that the date on the image is occasionally more than one day behind. Occasional short-term delays and data outages do occur and are usually resolved in a few days.