Seasonal Antarctic Sea Ice
- Visualizations by:
- Cindy Starr
- View full credits
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.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Animator
- Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC)
Visualizer
- Cindy Starr (GST) [Lead]
Scientist
- Sinead Farrell (University of Maryland)
Producer
- Kayvon Sharghi (USRA)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
Aqua 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.