How cold the ice surface is (VIIRS, Suomi-NPP, 750 m)

In plain English

What it measures. How cold the sea-ice surface is (its temperature), measured at 750-meter resolution along the satellite's track.

How it's made. Calculated from VIIRS sensor readings on the Suomi-NPP satellite by turning the measured radiation into how warm the surface looks, then applying a technique that uses two infrared channels to estimate ice temperature.

How & where you'd use it. Supports monitoring polar sea ice and studying how the Arctic and surrounding oceans are changing.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

Time span2012-01-19 → ongoing
Measured bySuomi-NPP (VIIRS)
Processing levelLevel 2
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsnetCDF-4
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 Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite. 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

vnp30_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VNP30",
    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.

Official links

Search and order NASA Earth Science data using spatial and temporal filters. Reformatting, reprojecting, and subsetting options are available for some data sets. GET DATA
Search data by spatial and/or temporal ranges or file name. Choose from various download options, including a Python script. GET DATA
Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. GET DATA
A Python library to search and access NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code GET DATA
Find more data access options and help resources. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
VIIRS/NPP Ice Surface Temperature 6-Min L2 Swath 750m, Version 2 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
SNPP/JPSS1 VIIRS Ice Surface Temperature Products Collection 2 User Guide [2021] VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
VIIRS Bands and Bandwidths VIEW RELATED INFORMATION