How cold the sea ice surface is (NOAA-21, 750 m)

In plain English

What it measures. Reports how cold the surface of sea ice is, given as ice surface temperature, at roughly 750 m detail.

How it's made. Derived from VIIRS readings on the NOAA-21 (JPSS-2) satellite, which are converted into surface temperature using a split-window technique similar to the one MODIS uses.

How & where you'd use it. Supports monitoring of polar ice conditions and feeds climate and weather studies that need to know how cold ice surfaces are.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

Time span2023-02-10 → ongoing
Measured byJPSS-2 (VIIRS) · NOAA-21 (VIIRS)
Processing levelLevel 2
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsNetCDF
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 data set reports sea ice surface temperature (IST) derived from radiance data acquired by the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Joint Polar Satellite System's second satellite (JPSS-2). Following the approach used by MODIS, the algorithm converts VIIRS calibrated radiances into brightness temperature and computes IST using a split-window technique.

Get the data

vj230_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VJ230",
    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.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links