AMSR-E Antarctic Sea Ice
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- Visualizations by:
- Cindy Starr
- View full credits
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 Antarctic sea ice progresses through time from May 26, 2009 through July 31, 2010. 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 minimum of the AMSR-E 89 GHz brightness temperature. Over the Antarctic continent, the LIMA data shown here uses the pan-chromatic band and has a resolution of 240 meters per pixel. The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) is a data product funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and jointly produced by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
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). LIMA Data provided by: Patricia Vornberger (SAIC) LIMA data produced by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and NASA
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Animator
- Trent L. Schindler (USRA)
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Visualizer
- Cindy Starr (Global Science and Technology, Inc.) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Josefino Comiso (NASA/GSFC)
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Producers
- Duncan Copp (Houston Symphony)
- Ryan Fitzgibbons (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
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Project support
- James W. Williams (GST)
- Shiloh Heurich (GST)
Datasets used in this visualization
Terra and Aqua Blue Marble Land Cover (Collected with the MODIS sensor)
Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).
See more visualizations using this data setAqua Sea Ice Concentration (A.K.A. Daily L3 12.5km Tb, Sea Ice Concentration, and Snow Depth) (Collected with the AMSR-E sensor)
Aqua Daily L3 6.25 km 89 GHz Brightness Temperature (Tb) (Collected with the AMSR-E sensor)
Landsat-7 LIMA (A.K.A. Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica) (Collected with the ETM+ sensor)
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.
Dataset can be found at: http://lima.nasa.gov/
See more visualizations using this data setNote: 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.
Related pages
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ID: 4368 Visualization
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ID: 3862 Visualization
Seasonal Antarctic Sea Ice
Read moreAntarctica is a land mass surrounded by an ocean which allows the sea ice here to move more freely than it does in the Northern Hemisphere. Because there are no surrounding continents to limit its movement, the sea ice is free to float northward into warmer waters where it eventually melts. As a result, almost all of the sea ice that forms during the Antarctic winter melts during the summer. During the winter, up to 18 million square kilometers (6.9 million square miles) of ocean is covered by sea ice, but by the end of summer, only about 3 million square kilometers (1.1 million square miles) of sea ice remain. Antarctic sea ice extent are characterized by fairly large variations from year to year. The monthly average extent can vary by as much as 1 million square kilometers (386,102 square miles) from the year-to-year monthly average. The AMSR-E instrument on the Aqua satellite acquires high resolution measurements of the 89 GHz brightness temperature near the poles. Because this is a passive microwave sensor which is not so sensitive to atmospheric effects, this sensor is able to observe the entire polar region every day, even through clouds and snowfall. The false color in this animation of sea ice surrounding the South Pole is derived from the daily AMSR-E 6.25 km 89 GHz brightness temperature while the sea ice extent is derived from the daily AMSR-E 12.5 km sea ice concentration. The sea ice extent shown is generated using a three day moving average where the daily sea ice concentration is at least 15%. This animation portrays the changes in the sea ice from May 26, 2009 through July 29, 2010. ||
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