The Odden ice tongue in the Greenland Sea appeared in 1996 for the first time since 1993, and with substantially larger amounts of ice. The purpose of this report is to quantify the ice development over the period December 1995 to June 1996. This is done by daily passive microwave observations of the large scale ice cover of the region, medium resolution daily observations by the NOAA AVHRR visible and infrared radiometers and by a selected set of high resolution ERS-1 and ERS-2 synthetic aperture radar images of the details of the ice cover.

The AVHRR and SAR images are also used to quantify the ice drift in the area during selected periods. In addition the variations in ice cover are related to meteorological observations from the Norwegian weather station on the island Jan Mayen situated at the southern border of the Greenland Sea. Figure 1 shows the Greenland Sea area and the Odden ice tongue as observed on April 4 and on May 8, 1996.

Figure 1. Ice conditions on April 4 and May 8, 1996 as observed by the SSM/I microwave radiometer. Blue corresponds to open ocean. Cyan, green, yellow, orange, red to purple indicates increasing ice coverage within the resolution cell which is approx. 20x20 kilometres. The overlayed frame refers to the area used to calculate the Odden aerial extent.