How is coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) affecting Indigenous Peoples’ access to food? National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) research scientist Noor Johnson, along with colleagues from the University of Arizona and the Indigenous Food Knowledges Network (IFKN), aims to find out. Johnson is a co-principal investigator on a new National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project, entitled “Impact of COVID-19 on Food Access in Indigenous Communities in the Arctic and US Southwest: A Comparative Landscape Analysis,” that focuses on how COVID-19 has affected food security and sovereignty in these two regions.

The St. Patrick Bay ice caps on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, have disappeared, according to NASA satellite imagery. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scientists and colleagues predicted via a 2017 paper in The Cryosphere that the ice caps would melt out completely within the next five years, and recent images from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) have confirmed that this prediction was accurate.

Arctic sea ice has likely reached its maximum extent for the year, at 15.05 million square kilometers (5.81 million square miles) on March 5, 2020, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The 2020 maximum is the eleventh lowest in the 42-year satellite record. 

Snow Today is a new tool available to help snow lovers monitor conditions. It provides near-real-time updates of snow conditions across the Northern Hemisphere as well as monthly analyses of the data, focusing on the Western United States.