Where sea ice is, daily daytime (MODIS, Terra, 1 km)

In plain English

What it measures. Where sea ice is present each day during daylight, plus how cold the ice surface is, mapped across the globe at about 1 km detail.

How it's made. Built by gridding the daily daytime sea-ice readings from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite into 10-by-10-degree map tiles.

How & where you'd use it. Helps track the changing extent of sea ice for climate monitoring, navigation, and polar research.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE EXTENTCRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

Time span2000-02-24 → ongoing
Measured byTerra (MODIS)
Processing levelLevel 3
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsHDF-EOS2
StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

Measure sea ice, snow cover and glaciers
Watch ice-sheet elevation change
Track freeze/thaw and permafrost

Official description

This global Level-3 (L3) data set provides daily daytime sea ice extent and ice surface temperature derived from the 'MODIS/Terra Sea Ice Extent 5-Min L2 Swath 1km' (https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD29.061) product. Each data granule is a tile consisting of 10 x 10 degrees of data gridded to the Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid). The terms "Version 61" and "Collection 6.1" are used interchangeably in reference to this release of MODIS data.

Get the data

mod29p1d_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="MOD29P1D",
    version="61",
    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.

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
MODIS/Terra Sea Ice Extent Daily L3 Global 1km EASE-Grid Day, Version 61 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
MODIS Grids and Tile Locators VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
MODIS Sea Ice Products User Guide to Collection 6.1 VIEW RELATED INFORMATION