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Full catalog/AU_SI12
AU_SI12·v1·dataset

Sea ice cover, motion and snow depth, daily (AMSR2, 12.5 km)

AMSR-E/AMSR2 Unified L3 Daily 12.5 km Brightness Temperatures, Sea Ice Concentration, Motion & Snow Depth Polar Grids V001
land NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 HDF-EOS5ASCII
In plain English

What it measures. Daily polar maps of sea ice, including how much of the ocean is ice-covered, snow depth on top of the ice, and microwave brightness temperatures (how warm surfaces look at microwave wavelengths), plus Arctic ice motion, at 12.5-km detail.

How it's made. Derived from the AMSR-E and AMSR2 microwave instruments aboard the Aqua and GCOM-W1 satellites, with measurements resampled to combine both missions into one consistent record.

How & where you'd use it. Used to monitor sea ice extent, movement, and snow cover in the Arctic and Antarctic, important for climate research, navigation, and tracking polar change.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › BRIGHTNESS TEMPERATURECRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › SEA ICE CONCENTRATIONCRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › SEA ICE MOTIONCRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › SNOW DEPTH

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-06-01 → 2011-10-04
  • Measured byAqua (AMSR-E) · GCOM-W1 (AMSR2)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -89.24, 180, -39.23
  • FormatsHDF-EOS5, ASCII
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

This data set reports average daily horizontally and vertically polarized brightness temperatures; sea ice concentrations; and snow depths over sea ice on 12.5 km resolution north and south polar stereographic grids. Ungridded sea ice motion data are also available for the Arctic. The data are derived from observations acquired by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) for EOS (AMSR-E) and AMSR2 instruments that have been spatially resampled by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to unify the AMSR-E and AMSR2 missions. Brightness temperatures are available at 18.7 GHz, 23.8 GHz, 36.5 GHz and 89.0 GHz for ascending and descending orbits, and as a single daily average. Sea ice concentrations are generated with the Enhanced NASA Team (NT2) algorithm; a separate variable reports the daily sea ice concentration difference between the legacy AMSR Basic Bootstrap Algorithm (ABA) and the NT2.

Get the data

au_si12_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AU_SI12",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.