Scientific Visualization Image of 2010 Greenland Snow Melt

After experiencing their warmest year on record, many of the southern and western areas of Greenland also had the longest number of days that snow melted. The snow melt in 2010 lasted lasted 50 days longer than the 1979-2009 average snow melt normally does. In the image to the right, areas in orange and red experienced longer snow melt days while areas in light blue had fewer snow melt days. Good luck finding the light blue areas. Unless you click on the image to make it larger, I doubt that you will be able to see them. Since the light blue areas occur at the very edges of the data, and since they occur right next to some of the highest snow melt days, I suspect that they may be artifacts in the data, and not true values.

Since this is fresh water that is melting, the seas around Greenland have a slight decrease in salinity. The melting of this snow may also increase global sea levels, although scientists do not know to what extent this will occur. Some scientists think that it could increase the global sea level by up to 0.6 meters or about two feet.

This image was assembled from microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) of the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program. Snow and ice emit microwaves, but the signal is different for wet, melting snow than for dry. Marco Tedesco, a professor at the City College of New York, uses this difference to chart the number of days that snow is melting every year. This image above shows 2010 compared to the average number of melt days per year between 1979 and 2009.

via : Record Melting in Greenland during 2010 @ NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day

This story written by Paul Adams

Paul Adams leads an award-winning, diverse contractor team that runs a federal high performance computing facility where he has worked for 17 years. He loves getting his hands on the latest visualization and computer hardware, astronomy, aerospace engineering, working with the poor, and ringing cowbells.