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Full catalog/MOD29P1D
MOD29P1D·v61·dataset

Where sea ice sits, daily in daylight, from NASA's MODIS on the Terra satellite (1 km detail)

MODIS/Terra Sea Ice Extent Daily L3 Global 1km EASE-Grid Day V061
cryosphere NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 active HDF-EOS2
In plain English

What it measures. Where sea ice is present each day during daylight, plus how cold the ice surface is, mapped across the globe at about 1 km detail.

How it's made. Built by gridding the daily daytime sea-ice readings from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite into 10-by-10-degree map tiles.

How & where you'd use it. Helps track the changing extent of sea ice for climate monitoring, navigation, and polar research.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE EXTENTCRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE TEMPERATURE

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2000-02-24 → ongoing
  • Measured byTerra (MODIS)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • FormatsHDF-EOS2
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Measure sea ice, snow cover and glaciers
  • Watch ice-sheet elevation change
  • Track freeze/thaw and permafrost
Official description

This global Level-3 (L3) data set provides daily daytime sea ice extent and ice surface temperature derived from the 'MODIS/Terra Sea Ice Extent 5-Min L2 Swath 1km' (https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD29.061) product. Each data granule is a tile consisting of 10 x 10 degrees of data gridded to the Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid). The terms "Version 61" and "Collection 6.1" are used interchangeably in reference to this release of MODIS data.

Get the data

mod29p1d_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="MOD29P1D",
    version="61",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.