by Allan Roberts
You can access sea ice data from the NEPTUNE Canada observatory at Cambridge Bay, in the Arctic. How? For live Arctic ice data go to www.neptunecanada.com. Click on “DATA & TOOLS” and log in. Then click on “Data Search,” click on “Tools” and choose “Arctic Observatory.”

Figure 1. Hourly averages for ice thickness and water salinity. Location: Cambridge Bay, Cambridge Bay Dock station (69.114 N, 105.060 W, water depth 6 m). Data source: NEPTUNE Canada (accessed Nov 2012 at http://www.neptunecanada.com). Graph plotted with R.
The Data
Hourly averages for Oct 25, UTC.
Source: NEPTUNE Canada, http://www.neptunecanada.com.
year month day hour ice salinity
2012 10 25 0 0.11742062 27.1217342
2012 10 25 1 0.117969156 27.116128169
2012 10 25 2 0.119953206 27.115838405
2012 10 25 3 0.120090068 27.134417438
2012 10 25 4 0.12307668 27.132648218
2012 10 25 5 0.121284465 27.135914622
2012 10 25 6 0.124251313 27.137131234
2012 10 25 7 0.123291335 27.11412135
2012 10 25 8 0.123626263 27.112518787
2012 10 25 9 0.124672597 27.108994459
2012 10 25 10 0.12619236 27.104893645
2012 10 25 11 0.128541307 27.138603664
2012 10 25 12 0.129542576 27.095719877
2012 10 25 13 0.130593295 27.153260476
2012 10 25 14 0.132342038 27.142623608
2012 10 25 15 0.131895781 27.164480543
2012 10 25 16 0.131755875 27.156398032
2012 10 25 17 0.134317464 27.158526643
2012 10 25 18 0.133336918 27.153010388
2012 10 25 19 0.134056296 27.155455795
2012 10 25 20 0.134588446 27.165800435
2012 10 25 21 0.134001942 27.160435323
2012 10 25 22 0.135544097 27.15158589
2012 10 25 23 0.137094968 27.151961331
If you cut and paste the data set above into a word file, save it as a txt file, and load it into R with “read.table( )”, you can plot your own graph!
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