data source · draft
NSIDC Sea Ice Index
National Snow and Ice Data Center's running record of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent and concentration, daily and monthly, from November 1978 to the present. Version 4.
What is reusable: unknown sourceopen dataAPI unknownunknown participation
The Sea Ice Index gives a quick look at Arctic- and Antarctic-wide changes in sea ice: extent and concentration as images and as data values, from November 1978 to the present, produced in a consistent way so the series suits long-term trends. Its own trend and anomaly images use a 1981–2010 reference period. Both daily and monthly products exist; NSIDC advises the monthly product for trend analysis, since day-to-day variation is often weather and errors in the daily product average out.
The data set is at a "Basic" level of service because of funding limits, which NSIDC explains on the landing page. It is free; NSIDC asks that the index be cited.
The Vitals page here reads the daily extent files for each hemisphere and draws its own 1991–2020 mean per day of year.
- coverage
- Arctic and Antarctic, hemisphere-wide
- cadence
- daily and monthly; every other day before 1988
- access
- open download; CSV and GeoTIFF files, PNG images
- format
- CSV, GeoTIFF, PNG
- homepage
- https://nsidc.org/data/g02135/versions/4
- cost
- free; cite the Sea Ice Index, DOI 10.7265/a98x-0f50
needed by
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Six running measurements of the planet's state, refreshed from their sources at every deploy.
Tags: sea ice, Arctic, Antarctic, polar, time series