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

In plain English

What it measures. How cold the surface of sea ice is at night, mapped globally at about 750-meter detail. It reports the skin temperature of the ice as seen from space.

How it's made. Derived from the VIIRS instrument on the NOAA-21 satellite by converting its measured radiation into temperatures and combining infrared bands (a split-window method) to estimate ice surface temperature.

How & where you'd use it. Helps scientists monitor sea ice and polar conditions, including how the ice surface gains and loses heat.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

Time span2023-02-10 → ongoing
Measured byJPSS-2 (VIIRS) · NOAA-21 (VIIRS)
Processing levelLevel 3
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsHDF-EOS5
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). Following the approach used by MODIS, the algorithm converts VIIRS calibrated radiances into brightness temperature and computes IST using a split-window technique. VIIRS flies on board the Joint Polar Satellite System 2 (JPSS-2), also known as NOAA-21.

Get the data

vj230p1n_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VJ230P1N",
    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