Selection of Documentation Related to National Ice Center Sea Ice Charts in Digital Format:Special rept. no. 13

摘要

This report compiles scattered written descriptions of National Ice Center (NIC) sea ice chart digitization efforts into a single citable document. NIC is a joint U.S. Navy, NOAA, and Coast Guard center that produces operational ice analyses. The NIC sea ice chart series begins in 1972, and offers a valuable record of ice conditions that supplements records from other sources, such as passive microwave satellite data. Analyses are available on-line from NIC in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) compatible form. Past and present collaborations between NIC and the polar research community have made the chart series available in other formats as well (e.g., Arctic Climatology Project, 2000; National Ice Center, 2006). Researchers using the NIC data sets distributed by NSIDC will benefit from understanding how charts are created, what data sources are used, how charts have been digitized in the past, and how chart information has changed over the years. This report complies some useful information pertaining to these issues. Other useful references are Dedrick et al. (2001) and Partington et al. (2003), with information on how the charts can be used to study sea ice; van Woert (2002) with general information on NIC products and processes; and Kokaly (1996), with information on gridding sea ice chart data. This report includes National Ice Center 7-Day Sea Ice Charts, which is a compact description of the charts on the Environmental Working Group (EWG) Sea Ice Atlas (Arctic Climatology Project, 2000) and how they were produced.