NSIDC DAAC UWG Meeting August 9-10 Boulder, CO Access to NSIDC Data Across the Climate Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada NSIDC DAAC UWG Meeting August 9-10 Boulder, CO

Chris Derksen Research Scientist Climate Research Division Environment and Climate Change Canada SMAP freeze/thaw product development and validation Snow cover/climate analysis: -annual assessments (i.e. Arctic Report Card) -Co-I of CMIP6 land MIP Radar remote sensing of snow: -on land (new mission concept studies) -on sea ice (Operation IceBridge)

Environment and Climate Change Canada: Climate Processes Section Science and Technology Branch Atmospheric S & T Water S & T Wildlife/Landscape S & T Science Integration Air Quality Research Division Meteorological Research Division Climate Research Division Climate Processes Climate Monitoring & Analysis Climate Chemistry Climate Modelling & Analysis

Brown.Ross@ouranos.ca; Libo.Wang@canada.ca; Chris Derksen@canada.ca Science Question: How much snow is there in the NH, how does it vary from year-to-year, and how is it changing?   Main data sets: IMS-24km, IMS-4km MEASURES snow product GlobSnow and other SWE products Daily brightness temperatures (melt onset; snow algorithm development) MODIS snow cover products (daily Climate Modeling Grid) Data latency: daily for NH snow monitoring monthly for assessments such as BAMS State of the Climate Data delivery: ftp pull initiated by user (works fine) Issues: undetected missing daily IMS files (i.e. not documented). Can NSIDC automatically flag when an ftp failed from NIC and generate a request for a replacement file? caveats/issues with data products are not clearly indicated and tend to be buried in the documentation or not mentioned by the dataset PI. provide NetCDF version of MODIS snow cover products. The current format is EOS-HDF, often need to be converted to NetCDF formats first, especially for climate model evaluation studies. For long time series data, data push tools (put data order on users’ ftp site) would be helpful. Brown

Josh.King@canada.ca Science Question: Validation of Operation IceBridge snow depth on sea ice products   Main data sets: DMS L1B Geolocated and Orthorectified images ATM L1B Elevation and Return Strength POS/AV L1B Corrected Position and Attitude Data Sea Ice Freeboard, Snow Depth, and Thickness  Data latency: Pull whenever updated Data delivery: ftp pull initiated by user (works fine) Issues: At the time of data access, there were no geo-tools to subset the data into manageable volumes. Had to download over 50 gb of data and sort through it locally to get at what we wanted. Variety of file types and formats. Josh.King@canada.ca Brown King et al. (2015)

Stephen.Howell@canada.ca Science Question: Evaluation of CMIP5 predictions of future Arctic sea ice extent   Main data sets: Sea ice concentration (NT2/Boostrap) Data latency: Daily and Monthly Data delivery: ftp pull initiated by user (works fine) Issues: Map projections require re-gridding for CMIP-5 analysis Brown Laliberté et al. (2016)

Michael.Sigmond@canada.ca Science Question: Evaluation of seasonal prediction skill for different sea-ice attributes in ECCC’s seasonal forecasting system CanSIPS and evaluation of operational forecasts   Main data sets: NSIDC MEASURES & Markus et al (2009) for melt onset Sea ice concentration (NT2; Bootstrap) Data latency: daily for operational forecasts not an issue for historical forecast analysis Data delivery: ftp pull initiated by user (works fine) Issues: Climate modeling centre user group: limited background with respect to satellite products; search, download, and use with little consideration of product uncertainties Brown Sigmond et al. (2013)

Mike.Brady@canada.ca Science Question: Determination of daily regional high resolution sea ice motion for operational forecast verification   Main data sets: Sea ice age (Tschudi et al.) AVHRR APP-x, (NSIDC via U of Wisconsin-Madison) Concentration (NRT NASA Team2) Other datasets (SLP, SST) are sourced from NOAA (i.e. NCEP/NCAR reanalysis)  Data latency: daily for operational forecast verification N/A for historical analysis Data delivery: ftp pull initiated by user (works fine) Issues: Subsetting is kind of a pain, since we have to download and subset locally. Not that big of a deal, but would be nice to have DAAC-side subsetting. Map projections: move towards a single common standard across all NSIDC-hosted datasets, EASE-Grid 2.0 or Polar Stereographic? Brown

Chris.Derksen@canada.ca Science Question: Validation of SMAP landscape freeze/thaw products   Main data sets: L3_FT_A Cal/val data (protected access) MEASURES freeze/thaw (Kimball) Data latency: Weekly-monthly Data delivery: ftp pull from JPL Issues: Brown

General Comments Very positive feedback on services provided by NSIDC DAAC, from the perspective of both data providers and data users: very professional interactions in all regards Most common issues pertain to user specific projection, subset needs, and communication of data quality/uncertainty information Most issues/recommendations fall under the category of ‘nice to have’. The ECCC CRD user community wants access to data, DAAC-side data preparation tools, efficient data transfer, to facilitate data analysis on our end