Annual Accumulated Melt over Greenland
1979 through 2009

  • Released Wednesday, May 12, 2010
  • Updated Sunday, January 11, 2015 at 5:02PM
  • ID: 3721

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

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 2007 without a date overlay.

The associated date overlay.

No description available.

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).

Datasets used in this visualization

DMSP (Collected with the SSM/I sensor)

Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Special Sensor Microwave Imager

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Nimbus-7 (Collected with the SMMR sensor)
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Greenland Ice Sheet Melt Characteristics
Data Compilation | NSIDC

Dataset can be found at: http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0218.html

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

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