You may recall that I posted about how the National Snow and Ice Data Center has an issue with the DMSP satellite sensor channel used to detect sea ice. Cryosphere Today is a few days behind in update compared to NSIDC, and here is what their imagery now looks like before and after:
Above: Arctic “Insta-melt” Click for a larger image
Here is the link to reproduce the image above.
Larger “holes” are likely to open up in the arctic sea in the next couple of days as the sensor further degrades.
Here is what CT has to say as a caveat for the side by side images:
February 17, 2009 – The SSMI sensor seems to be acting up and dropping data swaths from time to time in recent days. Missing swaths will appear on these images as a missing data in the southern latitudes. If this persists for more than a few weeks, we will start to fill in these missing data swaths with the ice concentration from the previous day. Note – these missing swaths do not affect the timeseries or any other plots on the Cryosphere Today as they are comprised of moving averages of at least three days.
No mention of the issue on CT’s main page though. They are still commenting on George Will. They seem a bit out of touch on the sensor issue.
h/t to Garrett
UPDATE: 11:30PM 2/20 CT has removed the comments about George Will from the main page, but still no mention there of the satellite outage nor are they displaying imagery on the main page from 2/20/09 The most recent is 02/19/09. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.
For whoever is still interested, the maps that enter the comparison are still accessible in the archives. The last two days show less chunks of ice missing.
I got fooled – Cryosphere did the trivial “white-out” trick to disable the 2009 images available at http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh – they merely removed 2009 from the pull down menu for the years. Not only are the 2009 images still there, they are being updated daily, as always! You can select the dates you want by manually editing the URL used to select them. for example, to compare March 2 (pretty poor) and March 5 (quite good), use this URL:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=03&fd=02&fy=2009&sm=03&sd=05&sy=2009
You can also see individual images. E.g. 2009 Mar 2 is at
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/ARCHIVE/20090302.jpg