Evaluation of the Year 2000 Arctic Ice Pack Using MODIS

With the launch in December 1999 of NASA's Terra satellite, data from several new instruments became available for studying the Earth's surface. From one of these new instruments, MODIS, a daily 1-km resolution sea ice extent product is being produced by the MODIS Snow and Ice Global Mapping Project. In this paper we examine the characteristics of the Arctic ice pack for the March 2000 through September 2000 time period, looking at ice extent and area of open water within the pack from the MODIS data. We compare similar data derived from passive microwave sensors, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of higher-resolution optical sensors, compared with lower-resolution passive microwave sensors, for studying large-scale trends in the ice pack.