NOAA PolarWatch

What is NOAA PolarWatch

NOAA PolarWatch is part of the NOAA CoastWatch Program, providing public access to a data service focused on Arctic and Antarctic regions. It maintains a data and code repository designed to offer open access to a wide range of polar observational data. PolarWatch offers two primary functionalities:

• Data Access: Access to various datasets, including sea ice surface temperature, sea surface height, and sea ice thickness, among others.

• Tutorials: Step-by-step guides demonstrating quick access and data preprocessing techniques for many datasets in polar stereographic projection.

How is it related to CEFI

The NOAA PolarWatch observational data serve as a valuable repository for validating the regional MOM6 simulations provided by CEFI. The Arctic region under development will specifically align with the regional coverage of PolarWatch data. Additionally, the northern areas of the Northeast Pacific and Northwest Atlantic will include some polar regions.

The polar stereographic projection techniques outlined in the tutorial will be particularly relevant and useful for visualizing model outputs for the Arctic region.

Data Access

The data can be previewed, downloaded or accessed through two ways provided by PolarWatch:

1. Data portal: This offers a quick overview and preview of data on a polar-projected map along with a catalog of the hosted datasets organized by by topic.

2. ERDDAP server: This provides access to all the data hosted on PolarWatch.

Tutorials

The tutorials provided by PolarWatch consist of various example use cases. The code gallery offers an attractive tile overview of the available tutorials. Each tutorial links to a GitHub repository hosting Python or R notebooks that demonstrate how to access and preprocess the data, complete with detailed markdown explanations.