Aerial photos of ice and land from IceBridge flights

In plain English

What it measures. Aerial photographs of the ice and land surface taken from research aircraft, with each image tied to its location on the ground. They show what the surface looked like over Antarctica and Greenland.

How it's made. Captured by the CAMBOT mapping camera flown on NASA's IceBridge aircraft, then geolocated so each photo sits in the right place on the map.

How & where you'd use it. Helps polar researchers see surface conditions of ice and terrain and provides visual context for other ice-survey measurements.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › VISIBLE WAVELENGTHS › VISIBLE IMAGERY

Coverage & cadence

Time span2009-03-31 → 2013-04-26
Measured byDC-8 (CAMBOT) · P-3B (CAMBOT)
Processing levelLevel 1B
Spatial extent-180, 60, 180, 90
FormatsPNG, JPEG, 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 contains images taken with the Continuous Airborne Mapping By Optical Translator (CAMBOT) over Antarctica and Greenland.

Get the data

iocam1b_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="IOCAM1B",
    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.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links