What's new?
2011-10-27: New sea ice concentration data available from Bremen University based on SSMIS data
Announcement from Bremen University, 2011-10-26:
A new implementation for generating sea ice concentration maps based on SSMIS data has been implemented by Bremen University. This solution is currently flagged as 'experimental' but aims for replacing the loss of AMSR-E based sea ice concentration data. See above link for more details.
Polar View has now included this new dataset on www.polarview.aq.
2011-10-04: AMSR-E instrument onboard the Aqua satellite stops working
As of 06:58 UTC on 04 October 2011, the AMSR-E instrument on board the Aqua satellite stopped producing data due to a problem with the rotation of its antenna.
As a consequence no global AMSR-E based sea ice concentration data will be available anymore. Bremen University is working hard on a new solution based on the SSMIS instrument.
2011-08-09: Polar View helps identifying effects of Japan tsunami on Antarctic ice shelf
The tsunami caused by the 11 March Tohoku earthquake in Japan crossed the Pacific and broke off large chunks of ice from Antarctica, a study has shown.
According to the journal paper the study was making extensive use of the Polar View (Antarctic Node) services provided on http://www.polarview.aq Due to the Envisat orbit maneuver which is envisaged to last for about 10 days starting on 22nd October 2010, there will be no Envisat ASAR WSM imagery available. Data flow is expected to resume on 2nd November 2010. Please see http://envisat.esa.int for further details. The Polar View team apologizes for any inconveniences caused. In addition to met.no's seasonal ice chart product polarview.aq is now providing ice chart products compiled be the United States National Ice Service. The U.S. NIC is compiling these charts on a daily basis for both polar regions. They comprise two classifications - the marginal ice zone and ice with >8/10ths of ice coverage. The product covering the whole polar region can be downloaded in various formats - JPG and GeoTIFF with 5km cell size), ESRI Shapefile and Google Earth KMZ. Regional rasterized subsets are available as well - JPG and GeoTIFF with 2km cell size. We are happy to announce that sea ice charts are now available being our latest addition to the wide range of Polar View products for the Antarctic. These charts are compiled and provided by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute on a weekly basis and are available for the area of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Weddell Sea and the western part of the Kong Hakon VII Hav. They are available for download in a variety of formats including ESRI Shape file, GeoTIFF, JPEG and KML, as well as being provided as WMS and WFS. We have implemented an embedded version of Google Earth to provide a new quick way to view the current sea ice conditions in the Antarctic. Check the appropriate tick boxes to show the latest sea ice edge, sea ice concentration and recent high resolution images. Links are also provided to all separate KML layers. All of the Polar View information is now available in standards compliant WMS, WFS and KML formats which allows anyone to easily plug these information services into their own applications and software. Links to these data are provided here. A new KML download has been implemented allowing users to visualize the current sea ice concentration image in Google Earth. The download link is available in the KML-section of the high-bandwidth version of the website. This KML download adds on to the existing KML links of 24 hours ASAR-WSM coverage, 3 days ASAR-WSM coverage and the current sea ice edge. A new view has been added to allow access to the sea ice concentration data. Two new tabs have been added to the top of the map view, one continues to allow access to the high resolution ASAR images, the other provides access to the daily sea ice concentration data as defined subsets. All data are available through links on the right side of the map. A low bandwidth access point to the ice concentration subsets has also been set up here. The 15% sea ice concentration boundary is now displayed as a standard layer in the map view. It shows up in an orange/yellow colour and is compiled using the daily AMSR-E sea ice concentration charts compiled by our Polarview Partner the Bremen University. This data is updated as soon as a new sea ice concentration chart is available which usually is once a day. Furthermore we have included a status box on the lower right corner of the main page showing the latest status messages regarding the Polarview services. You can also see all the status updates on Twitter. The sea ice concentration chart provided by our Polarview Partner the Bremen University is now available through the web-mapping image browser. The data is derived from the AMSR-E instrument aboard NASA's Aqua Satellite, processed by the Institute of Environmental Physics at the University of Bremen, Germany, and made puplicy available on a daily basis. The Polarview-Antarctic Team The new Polarview - Antarctic node website is online! After a complete redesign of the old website over the summer months users can now access up-to-date sea ice information just in time for the upcoming Antarctic summer season. At the moment the main emphasis of the web site is to deliver high resolution Envisat ASAR imagery in near-realtime utilizing two different versions of the site: one high-bandwidth version fwith web-mapping capabilitier for easy image browsing at the office desk, and one low-bandwidth version offering more simplistic browsing e.g. for use on board ships. Over the next weeks more data products like sea ice concentration charts and continent-wide MODIS mosaics will be added. Keep checking! The Polarview-Antarctic TeamSatellite photos show huge icebergs were created when the tsunami hit West Antarctica's Sulzberger Ice Shelf. This caused 125 sq km of ice to break off - or calve - from a shelf front that has remained stable for the past 46 years.
The work, by a US team, is published in the Journal of Glaciology. The waves generated by the 9.0 Magnitude earthquake in Japan travelled about 13,000km across the Pacific Ocean before reaching the Sulzenberger Ice Shelf, causing ice to break off and float into the sea. The largest of the icebergs measured 6.5km by 9.5km, (almost the size of Manhattan) and 80m in thickness. The swell was estimated to have been just 30cm high when it reached the Sulzberger shelf. But the researchers say that over a period of hours to days, the dispersed waves caused repeated flexing of the ice, "fatiguing" the shelf and causing it to fracture. Kelly Brunt from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, US, and colleagues studied a series of synthetic aperture radar images from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite taken between 11 and the 13 March. This allowed the team to constrain the calving event to a period consistent with the arrival of the tsunami. "The impact of the tsunami and its train of following dispersed waves... in combination with the ice-shelf and sea-ice conditions provided the fracture mechanism needed to trigger the first calving event from the ice shelf in 46 years," they write in the Journal of Glaciology.
2010-10-21: Envisat orbit maneuver
2010-08-25: Additional ice charts from U.S. NIC available
2010-03-24: Ice charts now available
2010-02-09: More information available as WMS, WCS and KML
2010-01-29: Sea ice concentration available as KML for Google Earth
2010-01-22: New sea ice concentration access
2009-11-06: New functions and data available
2009-10-09: Sea ice concentration chart added
2009-10-01: The new Polarview - Antarctic node website goes online