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Image of AMSRE Sea IceAMSRE Sea Ice from 1/1/2008 - 9/16/2008 (1.3 mb)

Real-Time AMSRE Sea Ice Concentration

Description:

Sea ice is simply ocean water that has frozen. At least 15% of the ocean is covered by sea ice some part of the year. This means that on average, sea ice covers almost 10 million square miles (about 25 million square kilometers) of the Earth. Sea ice concentrations are monitored closely by scientists because changing sea ice concentrations can have a huge impact on the rest of the globe. Global warming is amplified in polar regions. Because of this, monitoring changes in sea ice can be a good indicator of climate change. The National Snow and Ice Data Center provides sea ice concentrations from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) which was launched on NASA's Aqua satellite in 2002. For information on AMSR-E at NSIDC visit nsidc.org/data/amsre. Because of their ability to detect sea ice through clouds during the day and night, passive microwave sensors provide nearly complete images of all sea ice-covered regions every day

The AMSR-E sea ice concentration available for Science On a Sphere is from the AMSR-E/Aqua Daily L3 12.5 km Tb, Sea Ice Conc., & Snow Depth Polar Grids data set. The sea ice concentration dataset is on a 12.5 km cell size grid covering both Arctic and Antarctic polar regions. White areas have 100% sea ice concentration and black areas have 0% sea ice concentration. AMSR-E sea ice concentration is available daily from 2002 to the present.

Note: Due to the real-time nature of this data, there might be some holes in the data that will be filled in within a week

Notable Features:

  • Seasonal change of sea ice
  • The sea ice maximum is typically reached in March and the sea ice minimum is reached in mid-September at the end of the summer melt season
  • The minimum Arctic sea ice extent is 2007 shattered the previous minimum sea ice record set in 2005 by 23% and contained 39% less ice than the 1979 to 2000 average
  • The 2008 Arctic minimum is the second-lowest recorded since 1979, and is 2.24 million square kilomets (0.86 million square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average minimum
  • Available in real-time

Data Category

Major: Ocean, Real-time

Keywords:

Ocean, sea ice, melting, climate change

Data Set Nameamsre_sea_ice
Data Set SourceNational Snow and Ice Data Center
Data Set DeveloperAmanda Leon; Ross Swick; NSIDC
Visualization DeveloperBeth Russell, NOAA/GSD
AudioNo
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