National Snow and Ice Data Center (NISDC)

March 6, 2018 7:43 AM

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) "supports research into our world’s frozen realms: the snow, ice, glaciers, frozen ground, and climate interactions that make up Earth’s cryosphere." The site has a wealth of information on the effects of climate change on these regions. The links in this post are focused on the north polar regions, including daily image and chart updates on Arctic sea ice coverage, interactive historic data visualizations, the Greenland ice sheet, and monthly blog summaries.

Much more background on historic and current research is available in their Annual Reports. I know this gets covered a lot; I wanted to make a post specifically about NSIDC, to make it more visible in Metafilter. NSIDC was linked here in 2012, but things have changed a bit since then.

posted by carter (3 comments total)

It still astounds me how much snow sublimates: that is, evaporates directly below freezing temperature or condenses directly from vapour to solid. It's one of the mechanisms that carves out hollows inside snow banks, allowing avalanches to happen. A huge amount of ice sublimates directly from the Antarctic ice pack from the wind-scour zones.
posted by scruss at 11:31 AM on March 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this post! There was a bit of discussion last year about the NSIDC in a post about the Canadian Ice Core Archive. (This piece has a good picture of the NSIDC freezer.)
posted by asperity at 1:36 PM on March 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

Ice data pedantry- The National Ice Core Laboratory, referred to above as the NSIDC freezer, stores physical cores of ice from all over the world, is a center cooperatively run by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey. It is not part of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is fantastic in its own right.

The NSIDC does fantastic work in data curation and informatics as well, with the lessons learned applied in fields far removed from snow and ice.
posted by rockindata at 8:04 PM on March 6, 2018 [2 favorites]