Annual Accumulated Melt over Greenland 1979 through 2009

  • Released Wednesday, May 12, 2010
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The ice sheet melt extent is a daily (or every-other-day, prior to August, 1987) estimate of the spatial extent of wet snow on the Greenland ice sheet derived from passive microwave satellite brightness temperature characteristics. This indicator of melt on each area of the ice sheet for each day of observation is physically based on the changes in microwave emission characteristics observable in data. Although it is not a direct measure of the snow wetness, it is representative of the amount of ice loss due to seasonal melting that occurs on the Greenland ice sheet.

This animation shows the regions of the Greenland ice sheet over which melt occurred more than three days between May 1st and September 30th for each year.

This animation shows the change in annual melt over Greenland from 1979 through 2009 with a date overlay.

This animation shows the change in annual melt over Greenland from 1979 through 2007 without a date overlay.

The associated date overlay.

Melt in 2009

Melt in 2009

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
The Next Generation Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

This page was originally published on Wednesday, May 12, 2010.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, January 14, 2025 at 3:00 PM EST.

Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.