MODIS Terra Near Real-Time Sea Ice Extent and Temperature

February 2000 to present data provides near real-time coarse sea ice extent and ice surface temperature measurements from the MODIS/Terra satellite. The dataset contains fields for sea ice by reflectance, ice surface temperature, and associated quality assessments at 1 km resolution, with 5 km geolocation fields. It is produced by the LANCEMODIS organization and is available in HDF-EOS format.

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 reliability for operational forecasting via the 'sea ice by reflectance pixel QA' and 'IST pixel QA' fields.
• Mapping geospatial distribution of sea ice using the 5 km resolution latitude and longitude fields.
• Distinguishing sea ice from open ocean using the Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) modified algorithm.

Strengths

• Provides continuous data from February 2000 to the present.
• Offers near real-time (NRT) availability for operational monitoring.
• Includes quality assessment (QA) fields for both reflectance and temperature data.

Limitations

• Sea ice extent data is at a coarse 5 km resolution.
• Key metrics like row count, file size, and exact update frequency are unknown.
• Data is stored in a specialized HDF-EOS format requiring specific tools for access.

Provenance

Source

MODIS/Terra satellite instrument.

Collection Method

Remote sensing using a modified Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) algorithm.

Time Range

February 2000 to present

Freshness

Near real-time

Geography

Global, with focus on polar regions.