Near real-time surface melt in Antarctica


Antarctic snow melt extent is detected using AMSR2 satellite passive microwave at 12.5 km resolution after Picard and Fily (2006). New observations are downloaded every day from NSIDC, which processes the data with a delay of about 3–4 days in general. The graphs have been updated on ????-??-?? but are valid for an earlier date as indicated in the graphs.

Caution: Near-real time processing is subject to various types of errors, data may be unavailable or corrupted and the algorithm to detect melt in real time is still experimental, especially early in the season. These observations must be interpreted with care !

The map shows where melt is detected (for the validity date), and the color indicates the melt conditions in the two previous days.

Number of melt days in the season

The map shows the number of melt days in the current melt season (since 1 Apr) up to the validity date.

download melt duration as geotif

Surface melt seasonal statistics

The current melt conditions are compared to past conditions, in the current year and in the the past years.

download melt extent data as csv

Data availability

The raw data used to produce these maps and plots are available as a zarr archive: https://snow.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/opendata/melt-AMSRU-Antarctic-12km.zarr. It can be opened using Python and xarray from anywhere using: 

melt = xr.open_zarr("https://snow.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/opendata/melt-AMSRU-Antarctic-12km.zarr")

Notes