Five Spheres - Cryosphere

  • Released Saturday, May 1, 2010
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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. The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) instrument on the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua satellite, provides data mapped to a polar stereographic grid at 12.5 km spatial resolution. This satellite data can be used to monitor the health of the cryosphere from space. This animation of sea ice changes in the Arctic is match framed to animation entries 3707, 3708, 3709, and 3711. Over the water, Arctic sea ice changes from day to day showing a running 3-day maximum 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 maximum 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.

For more information about sea ice see http://nsidc.org/data/amsre or http://modis-snow-ice.gsfc.nasa.gov.

In this animation, the Arctic sea ice and seasonal land cover change progress through time, from October 1, 2004 through October 31 2009.

Global Sea ice on a cartesian grid.

Credits

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

This page was originally published on Saturday, May 1, 2010.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:54 PM EDT.

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