What's new?

2010-08-25: Additional ice charts from U.S. NIC available

In addition to met.no's seasonal ice chart product for the Antarctic 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.

2010-03-24: Ice charts now available

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.

2010-02-09: More information available as WMS, WCS and KML

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.

2010-01-29: Sea ice concentration available as KML for Google Earth

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.

2010-01-22: New sea ice concentration access

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.

2009-11-06: New functions and data available

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.

2009-10-09: Sea ice concentration chart added

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

2009-10-01: The new Polarview - Antarctic node website goes online

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 Team