Data Announcements

Production of MODIS Terra and Aqua snow and sea ice products have resumed, and both Terra and Aqua products are almost caught up.

Due to a hardware failure on 29 December 2008, production of MODIS Terra and Aqua snow and sea ice products have been suspended indefinitely.

Additional data sets are now available from the Antarctic Cryosphere Access Portal (A-CAP). The data sets include elevation and ice thickness in Western Marie Bird Land, and laser altimetry of the Thwaites Glacier Catchment in Western Antarctica. Also, additional ice core locations have been added to the A-CAP Antarctic ice core overlay.

Four additional data sets are now available via the AGDC Antarctic Cryosphere Access Portal (A-CAP). The newly available data sets include ice thickness, surface velocity of Taylor Glacier, and basemaps for accumulation and Surface Mass Balance (SMB). More information is available on the A-CAP News Web page.

ICESat/GLAS Release-29 data for the Laser 1A (20 February 2003 to 21 March 2003) and 1B (21 March 2003 to 29 March 2003) campaigns are now available for the following products: GLA01 to GLA05 and GLA07 to GLA09.

Beginning on 01 December 2008, AMSR-E Level-2 and Level-3 Land products and Level-3 Snow products are Stage 1 validated.

The data set, Subglacial topography: airborne geophysical survey of the Amundsen Sea Embayment, Antarctica (NSIDC-0292), is now available through the Antarctic Cryosphere Access Portal (A-CAP).

The online NSIDC Glacier Photograph Collection has doubled in size since January 2008, with more than 10,000 high-resolution photographs of glaciers worldwide available for free.

Lisa Ballagh, NOAA@NSIDC at NSIDC project manager, gave a talk at AGU titled "Mapping Glacier Data and Photographs via GeoServer and Virtual Globes." The talk was in the IN02 "Virtual Globes at AGU" session at 2:25 p.m. on Thursday, December 18, MC 3014. We welcome feedback on our NOAA@NSIDC-related products and Web pages.

The AON is a collection of more than 30 projects studying Arctic ecosystems, oceans, and ice. The National Science Foundation is funding a Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (CADIS) for AON. NOAA@NSIDC's program manager Florence Fetterer and scientific programmer Julia Collins are working with partners at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to develop CADIS.

This documentary describes a pilot study conducted in 1972 in preparation for the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment's (AIDJEX) main experiment from 1975 to 1976. The study includes a main camp on drifting sea ice in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska along with two satellite camps forming a station triangle with a 100 km side length.

NSIDC has released new ICESat/GLAS data. Release-29 data for the Laser 3J time period (17 February 2008 to 21 March 2008) are available for the following products: GLA01 - GLA09 and GLA12 - GLA15. Release-29 incorporates significant and extensive changes to the atmosphere processing, additions and corrections to the waveform and elevation processing, and the incorporation of new tide models. Learn more about ICESat/GLAS Data collection and release history.

NSIDC would like to inform you that due to intermittent satellite maneuvers throughout the lifetime of Terra and Aqua, some geolocation information in MODIS data is incorrect. Data with erroneous geolocation information are being reprocessed to eliminate data that do not meet specifications. Reprocessing of all affected data is expected to be complete in Spring of 2009.

NSIDC has recently updated the Northern Hemisphere TOVS Pathfinder Path-P Daily Arctic Gridded Atmospheric Parameters data set. The data now span July 1979 to December 2005. Additional changes to the Northern and Southern TOVS data include a new file naming convention, a new FTP directory structure, and tar-on-the-fly capabilities described in the readme.txt file on the FTP site.

NOAA@NSIDC Liaison Florence Fetterer and WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, Director Roger Barry took part in the U.S.-Russia environmental data exchange workshop under the NOAA@NSIDC-Rosydromet MoU, held at the All Russian Institute for Hydrometeorological Information (RIHMI) in Obninsk, Russia. Highlights included demonstration of an impressive online system for handling Russian IPY expedition data by the WDC for Oceanography in Obninsk, and plans for updating and exchanging complementary snow station data and satellite derived snow data. NCDC’s Karsten Shein led the U.S. group.

NSIDC is pleased to announce that the DMSP SSM/I Daily Polar Gridded Brightness Temperatures data set has been updated through June 2008. Data set documentation and FTP data access are available from the data set documentation.

Release-29 data for the Laser 3I time period (02 October 2007 to 05 November 2007) are available for the following products: GLA01 - GLA09 and GLA12 - GLA15. Release-29 incorporates significant and extensive changes to the atmosphere processing, additions and corrections to the waveform and elevation processing, and the incorporation of new tide models.

Reprocessing is complete for all AMSR-E/Aqua Level-2B products. Data from 19 June 2002 (the start of the AMSR-E mission) to present are now Version 2, the validated or transitional version of the algorithm.

Reprocessing is complete for all AMSR-E/Aqua Level-3 products. Data from 19 June 2002 (the start of the AMSR-E mission) to present are now Version 2, the validated or transitional version of the algorithm.

NSIDC is pleased to announce a recent update to the Bootstrap Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I data set.