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Average sea ice conditions, trends, and anomalies. Cryospheric Climate Indicators Climate indicators for soil temperature, snow cover, sea ice, and greenness. State of the Cryosphere/Google Earth Snow and ice as indicators of climate change. More than 3,000 photographic prints of glaciers. See news from NSIDC and the cryospheric community. |
GeoRSS
September 23, 2008
Michael Zemp, a Research Associate at the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, visited NSIDC for two months over the summer. One of the primary goals of his visit was to initiate work on the Global Terrestrial Network for Glaciers (GTN-G). He met frequently with several at NSIDC, including Richard Armstrong and Bruce Raup (representatives from NSIDC/GLIMS) and Lisa Ballagh (representative for NOAA at NSIDC/World Glacier Inventory and Glacier Photograph Collection) to discuss ways to integrate the glacier data sets from various operational data sources into a single one-stop site. The outcome of Michael's visit is a short-term and long-term plan to achieve the main objective by unifying the databases in the short-term and integrating the data sources into a new GTN-G Web site as the long-term goal.
July 3, 2008
The Sea Ice Edge Location and Extent in the Russian Arctic, 1933-2006 data set is now available. The data are derived from sea ice charts from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI), St. Petersburg, Russia. The data set consists of edge locations and monthly and seasonal mean sea ice extents for each of the marginal seas in the Russian Arctic. The Sea Ice Index is the basis of a new module in Windows to the Universe.
June 2008
Michael Zemp, from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, is visiting NSIDC for three months. Michael will help us improve the quality of the records in the World Glacier Inventory.
Daily plots of sea ice extent are now available from the Sea Ice Index Web site.
March 2008
The Central Asia Temperature and Precipitation Data, 1879-2003 data set is now available. This data set expands the NOAA Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) of quality controlled meteorological records. Records are from 298 stations in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Data were subjected to rigorous quality control and homogeneity assessment procedures, consistent with those used for the GHCN.
Over 1,300 glacier photographs taken between 1957 and 1959 as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) are now available from NSIDC. This special collection, the DAHLI IGY Glacier Photographs, is part of the Glacier Photograph Collection.
January through March 2008
The National Park Service Glacier Survey reports covering the years 1932-1952, and 79 glacier photos from Peru taken in the 1950s by Fred D. Ayres were added to the Glacier Photograph Collection.
17 January 2008
The Sea Ice Index is the basis of a new module in Windows to the Universe.
17 December 2007
Great news! The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the Analog Archives collection a Preservation Assistance Grant for Smaller Institutions. This award will fund a contract with a preservation consultant to conduct a general preservation assessment of the collections. Below is the summary of the activities:
The Preservation Assistance Grant for Smaller Institutions will provide funding for the National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology (NSIDC/WDC) to contract with a consultant (Randy Silverman, Preservation Librarian, University of Utah), who will conduct a general preservation assessment of the collections of NSIDC’s archives. These collections are located in several office spaces, some shared, within the center. NSIDC is requesting assistance to determine the overall condition of the collection and establish a plan to create a more cohesive, accessible, and well-preserved collection. The assessment will include recommendations regarding proper housing for the materials, furniture requirements, security, and environmental controls within the archives, and archives policy creation. The consultant will provide the NSIDC archivist with a written report detailing his findings, recommendations that will form the basis of future preservation implementation efforts at NSIDC.
GEOportal permits users to benefit from the GEOSS by accessing a variety of Earth Observation data, information and services via a single portal. To read the NOAA@NSIDC entries, click on the sun icons near the Arctic.
For more information, please see the Quality Assessment and History of Updates section of the data set documentation. To access the new data from this update, proceed to the World Glacier Inventory search page and select "CAREERI, Lanzhou, China. Che/Wu" from the Data Contributor pull-down menu.
12 November 2007
These newly-published data, from the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, are an important new data source for those studying the role of sea ice in climate change.
October 2007
Sea Ice Index graphics and numbers figured prominently in coverage of this year's record sea ice extent minimum. The Index Web site had more than 135,000 hits from more than 9000 distinct users in the month of September alone.
AIDJEX was a pioneering experiment that in the mid 1970s provided answers to emerging questions about how sea ice moves and changes in response to the influence of ocean and atmosphere. See the new AIDJEX page for links to a photo gallery, related material, and to a new retrospective on the experiment by Norbert Untersteiner, AIDJEX Project Director, 1971-1977.
27 September 2007
Today's update to the online collection includes 50 photographs taken between 1890 and 1996. Represented in this batch are Colorado glacier photographs taken by Junius Henderson, Oscar A. Randolph, Rudolph Johnson, and Russell Allen. The glaciers are Andrews, Arapaho, Fair, Isabel, Mills, Saint Vrain and Taylor. Other photos include a series of Franz Josef Glacier (1951-1964), and Harry Fielding Reid images of John Muir's cabin taken in 1890.
September 2007
National Ice Center Arctic Sea Ice Charts and Climatologies in Gridded Format can now be easily browsed. Using a using a Web Image Spreadsheet Tool (WIST), one can quickly compare (visually) different time periods and products. Click on Browse Images at the top of the product site to see how it works. Use the drop down menus to change the number of rows and columns, and the chart products and time period being displayed.
The Sea Ice Index pages have been redesigned so that graphs and images are easier to find. Thumbnails now take users to the Web Image Spreadsheet Tool (WIST), where one can quickly compare images from different time periods. GIS compatible files (shapefiles) of monthly ice coverage are now available as well.
Sea ice animations are now available in the dataset catalog of NOAA's Science On a Sphere. Animations of sea ice concentration show the annual cycle and give some idea of its variability, while a series of September monthly means from 1987 on highlights the change in the annual Arctic minimum sea ice extent through time.
September 2007
NSIDC is pleased to announce updates to the Glacier Photograph Collection. More than 1,200 photographs of Greenland glaciers have been digitized from slides and are available online for viewing and downloading. The Greenland photograph collection was donated to the World Data Center for Glaciology, Boulder in the mid 1980s by Captain Ron Kollmeyer of the U.S. Coast Guard. Captain Kollmeyer was the lead for the Greenland Glacier Survey. The photographs of western Greenland glaciers were taken between 1969 and 1980, from ground observation stations and from U.S. Coast Guard helicopters at an altitude between 100 and 1,000 feet. To access the new data from this update, proceed to http://nsidc.org/data/glacier_photo/photo_query.html and select "Country" from the available search options. On the next screen choose "Greenland (DK)" from the Country pull-down menu.
August 2007
The World Glacier Inventory has recently been updated. Over 1,600 glaciers from the former Soviet Union were added and errors with 368 glacier IDs were identified and corrected. For more information, please see the "Quality Assessment and History of Updates" section in the data set "Documentation" for further details about these updates. To access the new data from this update, proceed to the World Glacier Inventory search page, and select "Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Science. Chernova" from the Data Contributor pull-down menu.
30 June 2007
Ice edge positions come from ship logbooks, diaries, and other sources, in addition to more recent satellite data products. Data are available as ASCII text, browse images, and as shapefiles (GIS format). This long record sheds light on ice edge variability through regional shifts in climate.
26 June 2007
NSIDC's latest KML file is included in the Google Earth Outreach Environment and Science Showcase. It includes a Sea Ice Index animation, Repeat Photography of Glaciers, and an Antarctic ice shelf break-up animation.
6 June 2007
Keep up with new data releases using the NOAA@NSIDC team's GeoRSS feed. Project manager Lisa Ballagh gave a talk on "Communicating Scientific Buzz with GeoRSS" at the Fifth International Symposium on Digital Earth, San Francisco, 5-9 June.
3-6 June 2007
The Special Libraries Association conference in Denver had a session on "Resources for the International Polar Year" at which Ruth Duerr spoke on Discovery and Access of Historic Literature from the IPYs (DAHLI). Duerr and NSIDC archivist and librarian Allaina Howard lead the project, which is partially supported by the NOAA Climate Database Modernization Program. Howard presented a paper on Tracking Climate Change in the 21st Century: Supporting Research with Historic Photographs and Google Earth. Former Vice President Al Gore opened the conference, highlighting importance of special libraries.
22 April 2007
Good Days on the Trail was shown as part of the University of Colorado International Film Series. The film, with color footage of CU students on alpine hikes, provides a glimpse into the mountaineering lifestyle of an earlier time, along with shots of Arapaho Glacier and other Front Range glaciers. Scientists from NSIDC and the CU Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research narrated. The film is being preserved and digitized with support from the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center and the Climate Database Modernization Program.
16 March 2007
The Sea Ice Index viewed using Google Earth illustrated "Perspectives on the Arctic's Shrinking Sea-Ice Cover": a review article in Vol. 315 of Science. The data product had more than 47,000 distinct users in 2006 (summed monthly) and currently averages over 6000 users each month.
March 2007
The Glacier Photograph Collection is an exceedingly popular part of our data portfolio. Allaina Howard's role in developing this and other analog collections was recognized by NSIDC's parent organization, CIRES.
February, 2007
CADIS is one of several proposals to support IPY data management. It is focused on the Arctic Observing Network and Study of Environmental Arctic Change science programs and funded by NSF. The project is a joint effort of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and NSIDC. NOAA@NSIDC's Florence Fetterer is the NSIDC lead.
January 2007
Sea Ice Index usage statistics saw the largest jump ever in January. Previously, the record number of hits was in October 2006 (following a seasonal pattern of most hits in September or October) at 54,613. January 2007 had 62,966, 15% more. But more significantly, the number of unique users increased by 102%, from 6,562 in December 2006 (pervious record) to 13,317 in January 2007.
December 2006
Look for posters on Submarine Upward Looking Sonar Ice Draft Profile Data and Statistics (Wensnahan et al.); National Ice Center Sea Ice Charts and Climatologies in Gridded Format (Fetterer et al. presented by L. Ballagh; Meier et al.; and Stern et al.); and cryospheric data in Google Earth (Ballagh et al.).
1 November 2006
The National Ice Center Sea Ice Charts and Climatologies in Gridded Format cover 1972-2004 with weekly or biweekly charts and climatologies in 25 km EASE-Grid. Documentation on NIC charting procedures is included.
13 October 2006
At the upcoming Fall AGU conference in San Francisco, Lisa Ballagh will present Visualizing
Glaciers and Sea Ice via Google Earth
in the ED-21 session, featuring
images from the Sea Ice Index. The Glacier
Photograph Collection may be viewed using Google Earth as well. The
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), Vol. 87, Num.
8 (August 2006) published a brief summary of the NSIDC Google Earth project
in their "On the Web" section. See NSIDC
Data on Google Earth for more information.
15 September 2006
Sixteen cruises were added to this NOAA at NSIDC data set, markedly increasing the spatial and temporal coverage of these data that are used for sea ice thickness estimates.
30 August 2006
Precipitation measurements from 216 Russian arctic stations fill gaps in the historical precipitation record that are needed for applications including reanalysis validation, and study of changing climate. Documentation includes a section describing the relationship, in terms of stations included, between this data set and other commonly used precipitation data sets.
24 August 2006
These show changes in sea ice, greenness, snow off day, and soil temperature graphically and provide spatial and temporal context for changes. We hope to make improvements and additions to the Indicators over the coming year. The Indicators were introduced in a talk by F. Fetterer at the International Glaciology Society meeting in Cambridge, UK.
31 July 2006
IGARSS is a conference that attracts experts on Earth observations and algorithm development. Its location in Denver this year was a good opportunity for F. Fetterer to present a poster on "A Passive Microwave Derived Snow Melt Onset Product for the Arctic North of Treeline" with co-authors M. Savoie and B. Raup, work done for the Cryospheric Indicators product.
5 June 2006
Glaciers hold a fascination that goes beyond their scientific interest. The new Special Collection of glacier pair photographs matches photos of glaciers taken as early as the 1890s with recent photos of the same Alaska glaciers. The dramatic changes draw attention: Photos from the collection appeared in Science magazine, and in news outlets including the New York Times.
16-18 March 2006
Project Manager Lisa Ballagh presented a talk at the 6th Annual International Arctic Workshop, held at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Boulder, Colorado. The talk showcased snow and ice images in Google Earth. See Ballagh's presentation, NSIDC Showcases the State of the Cryosphere via Google Earth, and see State of the Cryosphere to access the KMZ file.
10 January 2006
William H. Dehn was one of the first ice observers for the U.S. Navy, flying in the 1950s on ice reconnaissance flights. NSIDC houses a collection compiled by Dehn of 6,896 paper ice charts of Alaska, the western Canadian Arctic and Bering Sea waters. These charts have been scanned through the NOAA Climate Database Modernization Program and many are now available online. Many charts predate satellite observations and the regular ice charting activities of the U.S. National Ice Center, and are believed to contain information on location and extent of sea ice cover that is not available elsewhere.
Last updated 06 July 2007
