And what did I find? The Arctic divided into basins. The same as NSIDC uses?
Not really! You can download the gridded data if you wish, and aggregate it any which way you choose:
http://www.cpom.ucl.ac.uk/csopr/data.html
You don't need to be "really clever", but I guess that's not necessarily right up the street of the average "amateur".
Hullo Jim,
As Tommy Cooper said "Not Like That, Like That".
OK, so I got a gz file, extracted the .txt file using 7-zip, and can see the data.
1. As I don't have any GIS/mapping software, can you recommend a really really simple dumbo program (freebie would be good)?
2. I read somewhere that the NSIDC mask file has all the seas allocated by code for each grid element. I guess that it is possible to match the cryosat data to that mask to be able to generate summaries by NSIDC classification of the Arctic seas.
Where can find a) the code book and b) the mask file ?
please, pretty please - I need some 'elp.
I will give it a go when I feel like making myself really confused and frustrated.
EDIT:-I remembered an e-mail I got some time ago from NSIDC. So
- I found the code list (attached),
- I found the mask file - on GitHub.
So I am stuck - I don't know how to use GitHub. Installing it might kill my ancient laptop?
And the mask file does not have lat / long but the NSIDC overview tells me there are tools to do it that I am totally unfamiliar with
A bridge too far I think, which is a shame. Adding the NSIDC sea code as an extra column in the cryosat-2 data would make it so easy to produce analyses by each sea and groups of seas to compare with area and extent data from the NSIDC excel files.