Ice in Hudson Bay, Canada

By Scott Bachmeier • 7 August 2015

GOES-13 visible (0.63 µm) images [click to play animation]

GOES-13 visible (0.63 µm) images (above; click image to play animation; also available as an MP4 movie file) revealed a large amount of ice remaining in southern and eastern portions of Hudson Bay, Canada on 07 August 2015. The ice can be seen “sloshing” back and forth during the day as winds and/or water currents moved it around.

The discrimination of ice vs supercooled water droplet clouds can be made by comparing Terra MODIS true-color and false-color Red/Green/Blue (RGB) images at 1611 UTC (below). On the false-color image, ice (and glaciated clouds with a high concentration of ice crystals at cloud top) appeared as darker shades of red, in contrast to supercooled water droplet clouds which appeared as varying shades of white to cyan.

Terra MODIS true-color and false-color images [click to enlarge]

A Suomi NPP VIIRS true-color image as visualized using the SSEC RealEarth web map server (below) showed the ice at 1800 UTC; even greater detail can be seen in this zoomed-in version of the image.

Suomi NPP VIIRS true-color image [click to enlarge]

Maps from from the Canadian Ice Service (below) indicated that the concentration of this thick first-year ice (dark green) was still as high as 9/10ths to 10/10ths (red) on 07 August; on 03 August, the ice concentration departure from normal was as high as +9/10ths to +10/10ths (dark blue) in some locations.