Sea Ice Images from Spy Satellites Made Public

For the past 10 years, spy satellites have captured super high-resolution images of sea ice at the North and South Poles, but until now, the public –and even most scientists – hasn’t seen them. Finally, hours after a National Academy of Sciences committee recommended that the intelligence community should release the images, they were published by the United States Geological Service.

From Wired:

The new data provides what NAS committee member Thorsten Markus called “a dramatic improvement” in what we can see. The previously off-limits sea ice data has a resolution of one meter. The previous scientific standard sea ice images from the Landsat program have a resolution of 15 meters.

With the new info in hand, scientists should be able to build better models of smaller sea-ice features like melt ponds and ridges. Both are believed to have important roles in sea ice dynamics, but how important they are remains unclear.

It’s not just the high resolution of the satellite data that’s got scientists excited. The intelligence community has also been snapping photos of more locations and for longer than anyone else.

“[The data] is better in quality, it’s longer in duration and it’s broader in coverage,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, who did not contribute to the new report, but is looking at similar issues for the National Academy of Sciences.

You can view sets of images from a number of locations including the Canadian Arctic, Barrow Alaska and the East Siberian Sea. For each location, there are high quality images from the years 2000, 2001, 2002-2006 and 2007-2008. It’s fascinating stuff.

Hopefully these images will help scientists get more information about how polar sea ice has changed over the past ten years. It will be interesting to see the influence they might have on current global warming science.

Link [Wired]

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