How fast Greenland's ice is flowing (monthly) — NSIDC-0731

In plain English

What it measures. Monthly maps showing how fast and in which direction the Greenland Ice Sheet is flowing.

How it's made. Built by combining radar images from the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X and Sentinel-1 satellites with optical images from Landsat 8 and 9, tracking how surface features shift between images.

How & where you'd use it. Lets scientists watch how quickly Greenland's ice is moving toward the sea, a key piece in understanding ice loss and its contribution to sea-level rise.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › ICE VELOCITY

Coverage & cadence

Time span2014-12-01 → 2024-11-30
Measured byLANDSAT-8 (OLI) · LANDSAT-9 (OLI-2) · Sentinel-1A (C-SAR) · Sentinel-1B (C-SAR) · TDX (X-SAR) · TSX (X-SAR)
Processing levelLevel 3
Spatial extent-90.9, 58.5, -8.32, 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 monthly ice velocity mosaics for the Greenland Ice Sheet. The data are derived from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, obtained by TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X and Sentinel-1A and -1B, and from optical imagery acquired by Landsat 8 and Landsat 9. See <a href="http://nsidc.org/grimp">Greenland Ice sheet Mapping Project (GrIMP)</a> for related data.

Get the data

nsidc-0731_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="NSIDC-0731",
    version="5",
    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