ESA satellite images record lowest Arctic ice cover

September 14, 2007 at 9:22 am | Posted in Arctic, Arctic sea ice, Climate change, ESA, European Space Agency, Images, Maps, Northern Passages, Observations, Records, Satellites, Sea routes, Visual aids | 4 Comments

Envisat ASAR mosaic of the Arctic Ocean for early September 2007, clearly showing the most direct route of the Northwest Passage open (orange line) and the Northeast Passage aka Northern Sea Route only partially blocked (blue line). The dark grey colour represents the ice-free areas, while green represents areas with sea ice.

Credits: ESA

This animation is comprised of Envisat ASAR mosaics of the Arctic Ocean for 2005, 2006 and 2007 and highlights the changes in sea ice. The ice-free areas appear as dark grey and the sea ice areas as light grey.

The data in each yearly mosaic were acquired between 1 and 11 September by ASAR working in Global Monitoring Mode with a spatial resolution of 1 km.

Note the exceptionally large ice-free area extending from the Siberia coast up to the vicinity of the North Pole in the 2007 mosaic.

Each mosaic contains approximately 200 Envisat images processed by the Earth Observation G-POD (Grid Processing On Demand) operated at ESA/ESRIN. G-POD is a powerful GRID-based environment coupled with large online archives of Earth Observation data products.

Credits: ESA

More details and high resolution images at Satellites witness lowest Arctic ice coverage in history on the European Space Agency (ESA) Observing the Earth website.