National Snow and Ice Data Center

The National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, is a United States information and referral center in support of polar and cryospheric research. NSIDC archives and distributes digital and analog snow and ice data and also maintains information about snow cover, avalanches, glaciers, ice sheets, freshwater ice, sea ice, ground ice, permafrost, atmospheric ice, paleoglaciology, and ice cores.

NSIDC is part of the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and is affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Geophysical Data Center through a cooperative agreement. NSIDC serves as one of eight Distributed Active Archive Centers funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to archive and distribute data from NASA's past and current satellites and field measurement programs. NSIDC also supports the National Science Foundation through the Arctic System Science Data Coordination Center and the Antarctic Glaciological Data Center. Mark Serreze is the director of NSIDC.

Read more about National Snow And Ice Data Center:  History, International Interactions, Research

Famous quotes containing the words national, snow, ice, data and/or center:

    “National isolation breeds national neurosis.”
    —Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)

    “Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “I know the ice in your drink is senile.
    I know your smile will develop a boil.
    You know only that you are on top,
    swinging like children on the money swing....”
    —Anne Sexton (1928–1974)

    “This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.”
    —Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    “When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)