Earth ID: 3813

Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice for the Dynamic Earth Dome Show

Visualizations by Cindy Starr Released on March 1, 2013

Sea ice is frozen seawater floating on the surface of the ocean. Some sea ice is semi-permanent, persisting from year to year, and some is seasonal, melting and refreezing from season to season. The sea ice cover reaches its minimum extent at the end of each summer and the remaining ice is called the perennial ice cover. This animation first shows the advance and retreat of the Arctic sea ice followed by same for the Antarctic sea ice. The sea ice changes from day to day showing a running 3-day average sea ice concentration in the region where the concentration is greater than 15%. The blueish white color of the sea ice is derived from a 3-day running miniimum of the AMSR-E 89 GHz brightness temperature. The animation ends by flying over the Antarctic Peninsula.

This was created for a planetarium dome show called Dynamic Earth and is produced in 'domemaster format'. The domemaster format was created by rendering 7 separate 2048x2048 camera tiles. The tiles were then stitched together to form final domemaster at 4096x4096 resolution. Both the tiles and the domemaster were rendered with 16 bits per channel with no gamma correction. Two domemaster layers were generated for this animation: the Earth showing sea ice advancing or retreating rendered with transparency and the star background without transparency.

This visualization was shown in the "VR Village" at SIGGRAPH 2015.

Visualization Credits

Cindy Starr (Global Science and Technology, Inc.): Lead Visualizer
Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC): Animator
Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC): Animator
Thomas Lucas (Thomas Lucas Productions): Producer
Josefino Comiso (NASA/GSFC): Scientist
James W. Williams (GST): Project Support
Shiloh Heurich (GST): Project Support

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3813

Missions:
Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat)
Landsat

Data Used:

ICESat/GLAS also referred to as: GLAS/ICESat 1 km Laser Altimetry Digital Elevation Model of Greenland

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Radarsat Antarctic Mapping Project (RAMP) Digital Elevation Model (DEM) also referred to as: RAMP DEM

Data Compilation - NSIDC

http://nsidc.org/data/docs/daac/nsidc0082_ramp_dem_v2.gd.html

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Landsat-7/ETM+/Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica also referred to as: LIMA

Mosaic - NASA/GSFC, British Antarctic Survey, USGS EROS Data Center

Mosaicing to avoid clouds produced a high quality, nearly cloud-free benchmark data set of Antarctica for the International Polar Year from images collected primarily during 1999-2003.

http://lima.nasa.gov/

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