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Full catalog/IPFLT1B
IPFLT1B·v1·dataset

Aircraft flight paths over ice (IceBridge)

IceBridge L1B Thinned Flight Lines V001
land NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 1B CSVShapefileKML
In plain English

What it measures. The paths NASA aircraft flew on ice-survey missions, simplified down to lighter, easier-to-handle lines rather than the full dense track.

How it's made. Built from the full-resolution flight records of Operation IceBridge missions over Greenland, the Arctic, Antarctica, and Alaska, then thinned using a Python tool called Shapely.

How & where you'd use it. Handy for quickly seeing where survey planes went and for plotting coverage on a map without loading the heavy full-resolution tracks. The matching flight reports are in a separate dataset.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › PLATFORM CHARACTERISTICS › FLIGHT DATA LOGS

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2009-03-27 → 2018-11-17
  • Measured byAIRCRAFT (VISUAL OBSERVATIONS) · C-185 (VISUAL OBSERVATIONS) · DHC-3 (VISUAL OBSERVATIONS) · DHC-6 (VISUAL OBSERVATIONS) · IKHANA (VISUAL OBSERVATIONS) · Multiple (MULTIPLE) · P-3B (VISUAL OBSERVATIONS) · RQ-4 (VISUAL OBSERVATIONS)
  • Processing levelLevel 1B
  • Spatial extent-156, 55, -130, 72
  • FormatsCSV, Shapefile, KML
  • 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 simplified, or thinned, flight lines from NASA Operation IceBridge Greenland, Arctic, Antarctic, and Alaska missions. The thinning was performed using a Python library called Shapely. The full resolution flight line data were collected as part of Operation IceBridge funded aircraft survey campaigns. The corresponding flight reports can be found in the IceBridge L1B Flight Reports (IPFLR1B) data set.

Get the data

ipflt1b_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="IPFLT1B",
    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.