It's been very cloudy in the Arctic this year. Luckily commenter dabize kept on sending me his 'declouded' version of the False-Colour Composite images Environment Canada makes of the LANCE-MODIS satellite images. These give us a good indication of what's going on. Hopefully he'll have the time for a couple more now that the freezing season is starting. Thanks for the great work so far, dabize!
Here is the latest animation:
White = cloud coverage???
Posted by: Nightvid Cole | September 20, 2012 at 22:00
When people have seen this they really need to read Julienne Stroeve's latest blog post:
http://iceedge2012.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/more-swells-and-an-itinerant-ice-floe/
If there's anyone here who's not seen it.
Posted by: Chris Reynolds | September 20, 2012 at 22:27
No.......white is red channel signal that is probably ice.
Either blue or white is ice - I've taken to leaving the red signal in when it is clear that not does not represent cloud.
For this animation, all of the frames were treated the same way. In the past, I've removed more of the red signal since I couldn't be sure of what it was. This had the effect of making the ice appear more uniform. In those cases, it was best to assume that the degree of white wan't much of an indicator of anything.
So in this animation, the white signal MAY mean something about ice thickness - especially away from the ice margin.
Posted by: dabize | September 20, 2012 at 22:29
When you compare these images with the Bremen ice concentration images, it looks as if the newest ice is whiter than moist other ice, since areas of new ice formation are in the "whiter" regions (in parts of the ESS and Laptev).
BTW - notice the big loss after the first frame - this corresponds to our storm of many names in August, which really did do a number on SIA and SIE.
Posted by: dabize | September 20, 2012 at 22:34
MASIE/IMS crew was peeking through the clouds and decided it was time for a record:
16-Sep-2012 2012260 3398785,21
17-Sep-2012 2012261 3520791,45
18-Sep-2012 2012262 3544682,16
19-Sep-2012 2012263 3438433,28
20-Sep-2012 2012264 3368882,08
What do they know?, you'd ask... Another GAC in the Arctic Basin cup?
Posted by: Seke Rob | September 21, 2012 at 18:26