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Full catalog/NSIDC-0801
NSIDC-0801·v1·dataset

How fast northern glaciers are flowing

Select Northern Hemisphere Glacier Velocity Maps Using Customized autoRIFT and PlanetScope Imagery V001
cryosphere NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 GeoTIFFShapefileCSV
In plain English

What it measures. Maps how fast five specific surge-type glaciers are flowing, along with estimates of the uncertainty in those speeds. It also includes glacier outlines and supporting reference data.

How it's made. Made by tracking the movement of surface features between repeat satellite images from Landsat, Sentinel-2 and daily PlanetScope, using a customized feature-tracking pipeline.

How & where you'd use it. Helps glaciologists study fast, unstable glacier behavior during surges, which matters for understanding ice loss and related hazards.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › ICE VELOCITY

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2019-03-05 → 2022-12-26
  • Measured byLANDSAT-8 (OLI) · LANDSAT-9 (OLI-2) · PlanetScope (PS2, PS2.SD, PSB.SD) · Sentinel-2A (Sentinel-2 MSI) · Sentinel-2B (Sentinel-2 MSI)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent11.54977, 78.6133, 12.7047, 78.7801
  • FormatsGeoTIFF, Shapefile, CSV
  • 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 consists of velocity maps and error estimates for five surge-type glaciers: Nàłùdäy/Lowell Glacier, Canada; Medvezhiy Glacier, the Pamir mountains; South Rimo Glacier, the Karakoram; Sít' Kusá Glacier, Alaska; and Aavatsmarkbreen Glacier, Spitsbergen, Svalbard. The maps are generated using CautoRIFT, a pipeline that improves temporal coverage during periods of rapid glacier motion by adding pre-processed, daily high-resolution PlanetScope images and customized feature tracking parameters for each glacier to NASA's autonomous Repeat Image Feature Tracking (autoRIFT) algorithm for Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery. Stable surface masks, area of interest (AOI) and glacier outlines, and ancillary data are also available for each glacier site.

Get the data

nsidc-0801_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="NSIDC-0801",
    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.