Week 2 Interactive Exercise - Sea Ice
For this week’s interactive exercise, we will be using the ESA Climate from Space tool. The Arctic has been experiencing a decline in sea ice in recent decades, and changes in sea ice have been identified as a mechanism for polar amplification making it a vital area to monitor. Arctic sea ice usually reaches its minimum in September each year.
- Go to the ESA Climate from Space application
- Click on ‘Data Layers’ which is on the top right
- ‘Choose Sea Ice – Northern Hemisphere’ from the list of layers. You should now be able to see sea ice extent in the Arctic. You can click and drag the globe so that you can see a top-down view of the Arctic, you can also zoom in by using your mouse scroll.
- Press the play button on the timeline below the globe. This is showing monthly sea ice extent from June 1st 2002 – 16th April 2017.
- What changes can you see with the sea ice extent over time?
- Have a look at September 1st 2002 and September1st 2016, then compare the extent of sea ice in those 2 years, what do you see?
- You can also have a look at the Sea Ice - Southern Hemisphere layer and play the timeline, do you notice any difference of sea ice extent on Antarctica?
- Lastly, if you close the Data Layers panel, and click on ‘Stories’, you can find a story on sea ice extent called ‘Breaking the Ice’.
Course topics
The core videos of this course are labelled as topic videos.
We have also provided a range of optional further reading, links, and additional resources to help consolidate your learning. Here is a summary of what is available:
Topic links and resources
In each topic, once you have watched the video and read the accompanying text, you will find the following information:
- Optional Further Reading: These are external links to further reading.
- Featured Images and Animations: Below the text on each video page, you’ll find the featured images and featured animations.
- Interactives: On the 'Interactives' tab on relevent topic pages, you will find a satellite tracking application showing the current location of the satellites, a data viewer from the ESA WEkEO platform, as well as a data viewer, specially created for this course, allowing you to explore a selection of data relevant to the themes and topics in this course. (Please note that due to maintenance, the data viewer is currently unavailable).
Quizzes and comments
- Quizzes: At the end of each week there will be a quizz consisting of around five questions. These will help you consolidate your understanding of new topics, but are not scored. The feedback given with each answer also will also provide you with important information.
Weekly interactive exercises
At the end of each week, we have included a guided exercise, using interactive apps available on other websites, to help you become more familiar with looking at and working with EO datasets. You will be guided through the process of searching for, comparing and drawing conclusions from data relevant to some of the topics covered in that week.
