Aqua MODIS Near Real-Time Sea Ice Extent and Temperature Data

Data from February 24, 2000 to present provides daily sea ice extent and surface temperature measurements. The dataset is produced by the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite and processed by the LANCEMODIS organization. It includes fields for sea ice reflectance, quality assessment, Ice Surface Temperature (IST), and geolocation.

Use Cases

• Monitoring daily sea ice extent changes using the sea ice by reflectance field.
• Analyzing Ice Surface Temperature (IST) trends for climate model validation.
• Assessing data quality for specific regions using the sea ice reflectance pixel QA and IST pixel QA fields.
• Mapping geolocated ice coverage at 5km resolution using the latitude and longitude fields.
• Distinguishing sea ice from open ocean using the Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) modified algorithm.

Strengths

• Provides near real-time (NRT) data availability from 2000 to present.
• Contains multiple data fields including reflectance, temperature, and quality assessment.
• Offers geolocation at 5 km resolution and other fields at 1 km resolution.

Limitations

• Primary data format is HDF-EOS, which requires specialized libraries for processing.
• Key metrics like total row count and file size are unknown.
• Data for other formats like GeoTIFF requires a separate ordering process.

Provenance

Source

NASA Earthdata via MODIS/Aqua satellite.

Collection Method

Remote sensing data collected by the MODIS instrument and processed into L2 swath products.

Time Range

February 24, 2000 to present.

Freshness

Near real-time.

Geography

Global, with focus on sea ice-covered regions.