NASA PACE Project: Aquarius and Antarctic Ice Data from Satellite Missions
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Description
Weekly gridded Level-3 satellite products from the Aquarius/SAC-D mission, including brightness temperature, sea surface salinity, normalized radar cross-section, and landscape freeze/thaw data for the Northern Hemisphere. The collection also includes Antarctic ice shelf, basin, and grounding line maps assembled from 2007-2009 International Polar Year data and subsequent measurements up to 2025. This data is a product of collaborative missions between NASA and Argentina's space agency, CONAE.
Use Cases
Monitoring sea surface salinity changes based on Aquarius L-band radiometer retrievals.
Analyzing polar ice sheet velocity and grounding line dynamics based on differential satellite radar interferometry (DInSAR) data.
Studying Northern Hemisphere landscape freeze/thaw cycles based on L-band brightness temperature observations.
Mapping Antarctic ice shelves and basins based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from ALOS PALSAR and ENVISAT ASAR.
Strengths
Data is derived from satellite missions developed by NASA and CONAE, indicating authoritative sourcing.
Antarctic grounding line mapping provides coverage from February 1992 through November 2025, a span of over 30 years.
Spatial data is distributed on the EASE-Grid 2.0 with a defined 36 km resolution for the freeze/thaw products.
Limitations
Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
Provenance
Source
U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Argentina's Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE).
Collection Method
Satellite remote sensing via the Aquarius/SAC-D mission and differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (DInSAR) from various space-based platforms.
Time Range
Weekly products for Aquarius; Antarctic data spans 1992-2025, with ice-front data from 2007-2009.
Freshness
Update frequency is weekly for Aquarius products; Antarctic data includes historical and projected records up to 2025.
Geography
Global for Aquarius ocean data; Northern Hemisphere for freeze/thaw; Antarctic region for ice maps.
Data is hosted on AWS S3; specific file structures and access patterns require inspection.