Sea-Ice drift vectors for Arctic & Antarctic (NSIDC)

Mean annual sea-ice drift distribution in the northern (left) and southern (right) hemisphere for the year 1992.

Access

UNRESTRICTED

Get data via FTP from NCIDC (binary format)

RESTRICTED only accessable in ZMAW network or via CliSAP login What does that mean?

View data via LAS

Access data via OPeNDAP

Data access via file system: /data/icdc/ice_and_snow/nsidc_icedrift

Description

Satellite data provided by the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR), the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) and Imager+Sounder (SSM/IS), and the Advanced Multichannel Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) are combined, in the Arctic also with buoy observations (International Arctic Buoy Program, IABP), to obtain a global dataset of the sea ice drift, separately for the northern and southern hemisphere, gridded onto a Lambert-Azimuthal Equal Area Grid with 25 km grid resolution.

The documentation Product User Manual informs about the method used and about tools for reading and displaying the data.

The figure on top of this page shows to sample maps of the mean annual sea ice drift in the Arctic and Antarctic for the year 1992.

Parameters

Name	Unit
binary: Sea ice drift vector (u,v,q)	u and v: cm/sec, q: Additive combination of quality flag and error estimation for each grid cell (see Product User Manual)
netCDF: u	cm/sec
v	cm/sec
sdev	cm/sec
flag 1	close to coast
flag 2	interpolating over large distances

Coverage, temporal and spatial resolution

Period and temporal resolution

11/1978 to 12/2011 (Northern hemisphere: to 12/2012)
Daily

Coverage and spatial resolution:

Northern and Southern hemisphere
Spatial resolution: 25 km x 25 km, EASE-Grid (see http://nsidc.org/data/ease/ and Product User Manual)
Geographic longitude: 0°E to 360°E
Geographic latitude: 48.4°N to 90°N and 53.2°S to 90°S
Dimensions: 361 columns x 361 rows (Northern hemisphere), 321 columns x 321 rows (Southern hemisphere)
Altitude: 0.0m

Format:

Netcdf

Upon request weekly, montly, and annual average sea ice drift data are also available (see also Product User Manual).

Data quality

For each grid cell and each day an error estimate and a quality flag is given.

In this context, please see at this article.

Contact

CliSAP / ICDC:

Name: Stefan Kern

Institute: CliSAP / KlimaCampus / ICDC

Email: stefan.kern@we dont want spamzmaw.de

NSIDC:

Name: Chuck Fowler

Institute: University of Colorado, National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC)

Email: nsidc@we dont want spamnsidc.org

Mark Tschudi, CCAR, University of Colorado, UCB 431, Boulder, CO

Email: mark.tschudi@we dont want spamcolorado.edu

References

Data citation

Fowler, C., 2003, updated 2008. Polar Pathfinder Daily 25 km EASE-Grid Sea Ice Motion Vectors,[Time period used, e.g. January 1992 - December 2001]. Boulder, Colorado USA: National Snow and Ice Data Center. Digital Media, distributed in netCDF format by the Integrated Climate Data Center (ICDC, http://icdc.zmaw.de) University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Maslanik, J., et al., GRL, 2011
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