Our Research

Starting in 2015, data from the NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite were collected using GPS signals. They had been stored, but not processed, because to do so required expertise in Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSS-R), a specific niche in the science community. Nereida Rodriguez-Alvarez, a specialist on GNSS-R techniques, jumped in and helped make sense of the collected data, which is now available at the NASA NSIDC Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC).

The 2024 melt season for the Greenland Ice Sheet ended with the second-lowest cumulative daily melt extent in this century, ranking twenty-eighth in the satellite record, which began in 1979. A late summer heat wave along the northwestern ice sheet closed out the season.

Using NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) data archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC), a research team has brought drought forecasting to near real-time.

A newly published study has mapped glacial debris across the Greater Caucasus, the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian Seas. The study found an increasing trend in glacial debris between 2014 and 2020. The authors relied on GLIMS data at NSIDC in their research.

As darkness extends southward across the Arctic, sea ice has advanced to much of the Russian shoreline, but growth has been particularly slow in the Barents and Kara Seas. In the Antarctic, with the onset of spring, the pace of seasonal sea ice loss has increased.