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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Earth Observations _ Images of (lots of) the Arctic

Posted by: elakdawalla Sep 3 2008, 01:26 AM

I'm trying to find something that may not exist, but figured it wouldn't hurt to ask here for help. I'm looking for a nice-looking satellite image(s) (optical or radar) that show the current extent of Arctic sea ice. The Arctic is a problem because of its polar location -- the geosynchronous satellites that give us whole-Earth views get only a severely foreshortened view of the poles, so they're not a good source. There are polar-orbiting satellites but they're much closer so you need a mosaic; and the pole being icy and oceany, it's pretty cloudy a lot of the time. There's a pretty great Envisat radar data set including http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMCKX0SAKF_index_1.html#subhead1, but as cool (and sobering) as those images are, they're not very aesthetically pretty. Does anyone know of anything prettier out there?

--Emily

Posted by: lyford Sep 3 2008, 02:15 AM

Maybe not exactly what you want, but you can roll your own in Google Earth....

http://nsidc.org/data/virtual_globes/
Arctic sea ice concentrations and extents, updated daily

I think NASA's World Wind has ahttp://exploreourpla.net/development/nasa-world-wind-plugin-wmsinterface/n, but I don't know that program too well....

Which may have been used tohttp://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

Posted by: tty Sep 4 2008, 10:31 AM

Try Aqua MODIS, for example this one:

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?A082121655

Posted by: elakdawalla Sep 8 2008, 06:32 PM

Thanks lyford, those are lovely; I hadn't seen that cryosphere today page before.

tty--MODIS images are lovely of course but that confounded Arctic climate keeps making too many clouds, which are awfully hard to tell from ice!

--Emily

Posted by: tty Sep 9 2008, 07:52 PM

The MODIS pictures may still be preferable despite the cloud problem. Microwave based ice maps are unreliable during the melting season and tend to underestimate the amount of ice since it is very difficult to distinguish open water from meltwater pools on top of the ice.