Week 3 Interactive Exercise - Ice Sheets
For this interactive exercise we will be analysing data on ice sheet mass balance and sea level rise from the ice sheet mass balance inter-comparison exercise (IMBIE), which is a joint project between ESA and NASA, and contributes to assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
- Go to http://imbie.org/data-downloads/and click the download button for the IMBIE 2018 Antarctic Dataset, which will download an excel file to your computer.
- You can open this in Microsoft Excel if you have it, or if not you can use Google sheets here (You’ll need a Google account for this), click blank sheet then go to File > open, choose the ‘upload ‘tab and then browse to where your spreadsheet saved to.
- You will now see a spreadsheet with 5 columns. And at the bottom you can click between Antarctica, Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica and West Antarctica.
- Starting with the Antarctica page, we will now create a graph to visualise the data. Choose the first column containing the year, and the 2nd column containing Cumulative ice mass change (Gt).(You can do this in by clicking on ‘A’ at the top of the first column, then holding shift and clicking on ‘B’.
- With these 2 columns selected, in Excel click on ‘insert’ then under charts choose ‘Scatter chart’ > ‘Scatter chart with smooth lines’. In Google sheets choose the ‘insert chart’ button at the top.
- You should now see a chart with year along the x-axis (vertical) and Cumulative ice mass change (Gt) along the y-axis (horizontal) and a blue line which plots the data.
- Now repeat steps 4 to 6 with the same data from the Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctic and West Antarctic. What do you see? Are all graphs the same? A negative mass balance means the ice sheets are losing more material than gaining.
- Now have a go at plotting ‘Sea level uncertainty’ with year, for each location. Can you see the relationship to sea level rise and mass balance?
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.
