NASA MEaSUREs: Daily Arctic Sea Ice and Antarctic Ice Sheet Data, 1979-2021

A collection of NASA MEaSUREs program datasets providing daily and annual records of polar ice characteristics from 1979 through 2021. Data include Arctic sea ice cover, age, and melt onset, as well as Antarctic bed topography, ice thickness, surface elevation, and ice sheet velocity. The data are derived from satellite-borne passive microwave radiometers and synthetic-aperture radar systems.

Use Cases

• Tracking long-term trends in Arctic sea ice extent and age based on daily passive microwave records.
• Modeling Antarctic ice sheet flow and grounding lines based on high-resolution velocity mosaics.
• Studying ice melt onset and duration in Greenland based on surface/near-surface brightness temperature data.
• Mapping subglacial bed topography and ice thickness in Antarctica for glaciological models.

Strengths

• Data spans multiple decades, with Arctic records from 1979-2012 and Antarctic records extending to 2021.
• Includes multiple derived characteristics such as ice age, melt onset, thickness, and velocity.
• Uses standardized grids like the 25 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid) 2.0.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML tasks.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program.

Collection Method

Derived from satellite-borne passive microwave and synthetic-aperture radar data.

Time Range

1979 through 2021, with specific ranges varying by sub-dataset.

Freshness

null

Geography

Arctic region and Antarctica.