Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice for the Dynamic Earth Dome Show

  • Released Friday, March 1st, 2013
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:52PM
  • ID: 3813

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.

The composite animation showing the Earth with the sea ice over a star background with 8 bits per channel.

The sea ice advance and retreat over the Arctic and Antarctic with transparency created at 16 bits per channel.

The sea ice advance and retreat over the Arctic and Antarctic with transparency created at 16 bits per channel.

The star background at 16 bits per channel.

The star background at 16 bits per channel.

Credits

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

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