AMSR-E Arctic Sea Ice

  • Released Monday, October 24th, 2011
  • Updated Tuesday, November 14th, 2023 at 12:01AM
  • ID: 3853

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.

In this animation, the Arctic sea ice and seasonal land cover change progress through time, from September 4, 2009 through January 30, 2011. Over the water, Arctic 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. Over the terrain, monthly data from the seasonal Blue Marble Next Generation fades slowly from month to month.

This composite animation shows the sea ice over the star background.

This shows the sea ice with transparency without the background star field.

The star background

Credits

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

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Datasets used in this visualization

  • Aqua Daily L3 6.25 km 89 GHz Brightness Temperature (Tb)

    ID: 236
    Collected with AMSR-E 2009/09/04 to 2011/01/20
    See all pages that use this dataset

  • Aqua Sea Ice Concentration (Daily L3 12.5km Tb, Sea Ice Concentration, and Snow Depth)

    ID: 237
    Collected with AMSR-E 2009/09/04 to 2011/01/20
    See all pages that use this dataset

  • Terra and Aqua Blue Marble Land Cover

    ID: 510
    Collected with MODIS 2004/01/01 to 2004/12/31

    Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

    See all pages that use this dataset

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.