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Full catalog/NSIDC-0478
NSIDC-0478·v2·dataset

How fast Greenland's ice is flowing (radar map)

MEaSUREs Greenland Ice Sheet Velocity Map from InSAR Data V002
cryosphere NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 GeoTIFFJPEGShapefile
In plain English

What it measures. Winter-season maps of how fast and in which direction the Greenland Ice Sheet is flowing across its entire surface.

How it's made. Calculated by comparing radar images of the ice taken at different times from several satellites (RADARSAT-1, ALOS, TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X, and Sentinel-1), a technique called InSAR.

How & where you'd use it. Lets scientists track how Greenland's glaciers are speeding up or slowing down, a key piece of understanding ice loss and its contribution to sea-level rise.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › ICE VELOCITY

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2005-12-13 → 2006-04-20
  • Measured byALOS (PALSAR) · RADARSAT-1 (SAR) · SENTINEL-1A (C-SAR) · SENTINEL-1B (C-SAR) · TDX (SAR) · TSX (SAR)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-75, 60, -14, 83
  • FormatsGeoTIFF, JPEG, Shapefile
  • StatusCOMPLETE

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 data set, part of the NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, contains seasonal (winter) ice sheet-wide velocity maps for Greenland. The maps are derived from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data obtained by the Canadian Space Agency's (CSA) RADARSAT-1, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS), and the German Aerospace Center's (DLR) TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X (TSX/TDX) satellites, as well as from the European Space Agency's (ESA) C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar data from Copernicus Sentinel-1A and -1B. See <a href="http://nsidc.org/data/measures/gimp">Greenland Ice Mapping Project (GIMP)</a> for related data.

Get the data

nsidc-0478_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="NSIDC-0478",
    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_CPRD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.