Format for 4 km
(1/96’th Bedient) ASCII file containing daily Northern Hemisphere
snow and ice
coverage produced by the NOAA/NESDIS Interactive Multisensor Snow and
Ice
Mapping System (IMS)
Each data file contains 30 lines of header
information
(ASCII text) about the specific data file, followed by a Polar
Stereographic 6144
x 6144 array (for the 4 km files) of format I1 (single integer) data,
with
(1,1) starting at the lower left corner. The top of the file is South
America,
the left side is the Pacific Ocean, the right side is Africa, and the
bottom is
0 – Outside Northern Hemisphere
1 – Sea
2 – Land
3 – Sea ice
4 – Snow
There should be no missing values over the mapped hemisphere.
The 6144 x 6144 Polar Stereographic grid has a mesh length of 4.0 km at 60 degrees N latitude and is oriented at 80 degrees W longitude. The coordinates of the North Pole are (3087.25, 3087.26). Grid point (1,1) is at 21.492 S latitude, 125.0 W longitude.