ABoVE: Pan-Arctic Open Water Cover at 5-km Resolution, 2002-2015

2002-2015 fractional open water cover maps for the pan-Arctic and ABoVE-domain regions. The data are provided at a 10-day averaged time step and 5-km spatial resolution, representing the aerial portion of a grid cell covered by open water. This data set was produced by NASA using brightness temperatures from AMSR-E and AMSR2 satellite sensors, with ancillary inputs from MODIS.

Use Cases

• Documenting open water patterns and inundation dynamics based on the 10-day averaged time series.
• Modeling surface water changes in boreal-Arctic ecosystems based on the 5-km resolution fractional cover.
• Analyzing climate change impacts on Arctic hydrology based on the 14-year temporal coverage from 2002-2015.
• Validating other remote sensing water products based on the microwave-derived fractional water data.

Strengths

• Covers a 14-year time range from 2002 to 2015.
• Provides data at a 5-km spatial resolution with a 10-day averaged time step.
• Covers two overlapping geographic regions: the entire pan-Arctic and the specific ABoVE domain.
• Produced by NASA using data from established satellite sensors (AMSR-E, AMSR2, MODIS).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Produced using high frequency (89 GHz) brightness temperatures from AMSR-E and AMSR2 satellite sensors, with ancillary inputs from AMSR-E/AMSR2 25-km products and MODIS.

Time Range

2002-2015

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 22:02:58.168223; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Pan-Arctic region (latitude > 45 degrees) and the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) domain across Alaska and Canada.