Ice sheet thickness from airborne radar
What it measures. How thick the ice sheets are over parts of Greenland and Antarctica, including the estimated error in each thickness, and in some files the elevation of the bedrock beneath the ice.
How it's made. Derived from airborne radar (the CReSIS depth-sounding instrument) flown on DC-8 and P-3 aircraft during NASA's Operation IceBridge campaigns, processed into thickness maps.
How & where you'd use it. Helps glaciologists understand ice-sheet structure and the land hidden beneath the ice, important for sea-level and ice-loss research.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2010-11-20 → 2013-04-20
- Measured byDC-8 (MCoRDS) · P-3B (MCoRDS)
- Processing levelLevel 3
- Spatial extent-74, 59, -12, 83
- FormatsnetCDF-4
- 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 Level-3 tomographic ice thickness measurements and ice thickness errors over areas of Greenland and Antarctica. Two of the data files additionally provide bed elevation measurements. The data were derived from measurements taken by the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder (MCoRDS) instrument and were collected as part of NASA Operation IceBridge funded campaigns.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="IRTIT3",
version="2",
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_CPRDBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Search and order NASA Earth Science data using spatial and temporal filters. Reformatting, reprojecting, and subsetting options are available for some data sets. GET DATA
- Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. GET DATA
- Search data by spatial and/or temporal ranges or file name. Choose from various download options, including a Python script. GET DATA
- A Python library to search and access NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code GET DATA
- Find more data access options and help resources. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- IceBridge Radar L3 Tomographic Ice Thickness, Version 2 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION