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Author Topic: New data set: Arctic Lead Area Fraction  (Read 5347 times)

Wipneus

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New data set: Arctic Lead Area Fraction
« on: December 27, 2013, 10:08:24 AM »
The Integrated Climate Data Center, ICDC, from the Hamburg University distributes a lot of data of the the earth: land, ocean, atmosphere and cryosphere. Lots of it is freely accessible.

Now they have done it again,  based on the AMSR-E data they calculated the fraction of leads in a 6.25 km polar stereo-graphic grid:

Quote
New data: Arctic Lead Area Fraction
By: S. Kern

Data of the Advanced Scanning Microwave Radiometer aboard EOS: AMSR-E have been used to obtain a dataset of the Arctic winter-time lead area fraction. Leads are elongated areas of open water or thin ice which can be several hundreds to a few thousands of kilometers long and can be considered as windows through which the ocean looses large amounts of heat to the polar atmosphere during winter. The data set spans winters 2002/03 to 2010/2011 and is available here:

http://icdc.zmaw.de/lead_area_fraction_amsre.html?&L=1

Hopefully they can extend the series using the AMSR2 data, I'd be most interested to see how the 2012/2013 stands in the series.


Neven

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Re: New data set: Arctic Lead Area Fraction
« Reply #1 on: December 27, 2013, 07:47:59 PM »
Very interesting, Wipneus!

I wish they had also updated their melt pond distribution database. I wrote about it on the ASIB at the time of launch, almost 2 years ago. One of the things I learned this melting season is that the start of the melting season is very important for how the rest of the season plays out, and the amount of melt ponds plays a very large role in this.

I'll have to ask Lars Kaleschke about this before the next melting season.
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ChrisReynolds

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Re: New data set: Arctic Lead Area Fraction
« Reply #2 on: December 27, 2013, 10:04:14 PM »
I wonder whether a timeseries of total lead area would be instructive?

Thanks Wipneus.

Artful Dodger

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Re: New data set: Arctic Lead Area Fraction
« Reply #3 on: December 29, 2013, 12:34:53 AM »
Thanks for creating this topic, Wipneus. I'm curious how useful a leads time series is for predicting end-of-Summer sea ice extent.
Cheers!
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sealife26

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Re: New data set: Arctic Lead Area Fraction
« Reply #4 on: December 30, 2013, 07:40:04 PM »
Thanks for creating this topic, Wipneus, this was discussed before, and I wanted to see the page.  I'm curious how useful a leads time series is for predicting end-of-Summer sea ice extent.

Yes, thank you for bringing this topic up.  I would like to know the same thing. 
« Last Edit: January 23, 2014, 12:25:09 AM by sealife26 »

ChrisReynolds

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Re: New data set: Arctic Lead Area Fraction
« Reply #5 on: December 31, 2013, 03:30:41 PM »
The data is in net cdf format, I'll try to make time to have a look at it and see if I can work out a time series of lead area. From a cursory look at the files I should be able to get at the core data without all the ridiculous overhead in the net cdf format.

EDIT - forgot to add.

There's a list of programmes that can access net cdf here:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/software.html

I've got Panoply already, but it's not oriented to polar data (although it can be 'forced' to do it) and isn't able to make timeseries. A Panoply plot is attached.
« Last Edit: December 31, 2013, 03:45:27 PM by ChrisReynolds »