NSIDC: satellite sea ice sensor has “catastrophic failure” – data faulty for the last 45 or more days February 19, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in sea ice.Tags: climate change, global warming, NSIDC, sea ice
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NSIDC: satellite sea ice sensor has “catastrophic failure” – data faulty for the last 45 or more days
From Watts Up With That, February 19, 2009
The DMSP satellite is still operating, but the SSM/I sensor is not
Regular readers will recall that on Feb 16th I blogged about this graph of arctic sea ice posted on the National Snow and Ice Data Center sea ice news page. The downward jump in the blue line was abrupt and puzzling.
Click for larger image
Today NSIDC announced they had discovered the reason why. The sensor on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellite they use had degraded and now apparently failed to the point of being unusable. Compounding the bad news they discovered it had been in slow decline for almost two months, which caused a bias in the arctic sea ice data that underestimated the total sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers. This will likely affect the January NSIDC sea ice totals.
Read the rest here
An Honest Climate Debate 