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    • Greenland Ice Sheet Melt Characteristics Derived from Passive Microwave Data, Version 1

    Metadata Updated: August 30, 2025

    The Greenland ice sheet melt extent data, acquired as part of the NASA Program for Arctic Regional Climate Assessment (PARCA), is a daily (or every other day, prior to August 1987) estimate of the spatial extent of wet snow on the Greenland ice sheet since 1979. It is derived from passive microwave satellite brightness temperature characteristics using the Cross-Polarized Gradient Ratio (XPGR) of Abdalati and Steffen (1997). It is physically based on the changes in microwave emission characteristics observable in data from the Scanning Multi-channel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) and the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) instruments when surface snow melts. It is not a direct measure of the snow wetness but rather is a binary indicator of the state of melt of each SMMR and SSM/I pixel on the ice sheet for each day of observation. It is, however, a useful proxy for the amount of melt that occurs on the Greenland ice sheet. The data are provided in a variety of formats including raw data in ASCII format, gridded daily data in binary format, and annual and complete time series climatologies in gridded binary and GeoTIFF format. All data are in a 60 x 109 pixel subset of the standard Northern Hemisphere polar stereographic grid with a 25 km resolution and are available via FTP.

    Access & Use Information

    Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

    Downloads & Resources

    Dates

    Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025

    Metadata Source

    Harvested from NASA Data.json

    Other Data Resources

    Additional Metadata

    Resource Type Dataset
    Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025
    Publisher NASA NSIDC DAAC
    Maintainer
    Identifier 10.5067/NON9395MQ9TK
    Data Last Modified 2025-08-28
    Category Earth Science
    Category Tag 16E15F51 D96E 4051 9124 75665Abdc6Ff "Arctic","Melting Glaciers, Snow and Ice"
    Public Access Level public
    Bureau Code 026:00
    Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
    Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
    Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
    Harvest Object Id 1fe4b910-72fd-4809-a9a8-01fd28c453d6
    Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
    Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
    Homepage URL https://daacdata.apps.nsidc.org/pub/DATASETS/parca/nsidc0218_melt/
    Old Spatial "CARTESIAN",{"WestBoundingCoordinate":-73.0,"NorthBoundingCoordinate":84.0,"EastBoundingCoordinate":-10.0,"SouthBoundingCoordinate":60.0}
    Program Code 026:000
    Source Datajson Identifier True
    Source Hash 37a385bb210d85925c744a95131d533d3a6f4db19fda4aac12c9cf22539da30e
    Source Schema Version 1.1
    Spatial
    Temporal 1979-04-02/1979-04-02

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