News

04 March 2008

NSIDC has released the Greenland Ice Sheet Melt Characteristics Derived from Passive Microwave Data data set which is a binary indicator of the state of melt of each pixel on the Greenland ice sheet for each day of observation. The Greenland ice sheet melt extent data, acquired as part of NASA's Program for Arctic Regional Climate Assessment (PARCA) program, is a daily estimate of the spatial extent of wet snow on the Greenland ice sheet since 1979. It is derived from SSM/I and SMMR passive microwave satellite brightness temperature characteristics using the cross-polarized gradient ratio (XPGR) of Abdalati and Steffen (1997). The data are provided in a variety of formats including raw data in ASCII format, data in binary format gridded on a Greenland subset of the Northern Hemisphere polar stereographic projection, and annual and complete time series climatologies in binary and GeoTIFF format all at a resolution of 25 km. All data are available via FTP.