Data Description

Antarctic Snow: Daily maps of the snow depth on top of the floating sea ice. Calculations based on 19 and 37 GHz microwave brightness temperatures (vertical polarization) as well as sea ice concentration measurements. Reference: Markus, T. and D.J. Cavalieri, Snow depth distribution over sea ice in the Southern Ocean from satellite passive microwave data, in Antarctic Sea Ice Physical Processes, Interactions and Variability, Antarctic Research Series, 74, edited by M.O. Jeffries, pp.19-40, AGU, Washington, D.C., 1998. Comiso, J.C., D.J. Cavalieri, and T. Markus, Sea ice concentration, ice temperature, and snow depth using AMSR-E data, IEEE Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 41(2), 243-252, 2003.

Data Format

Southern Hemisphere Snow depth files from SSM/I (1992-)

Files are stored in directories per year. Filenames are sYYYYDDD.hs, where YYYY is year and DDD is day of year. Byte arrays, 316 x 332, Big-endian Values are: 0 open water 1-100 snow depth in cm 200 land Contacts: Thorsten Markus, Thorsten.Markus@nasa.gov, 301-614-5882 Alvaro Ivanoff, Alvaro.Ivanoff@nasa.gov, 301-614-5886 Jeff Miller, Jeffrey.A.Miller@nasa.gov, 301-614-6611