Where to find polar data from the IPY and today

Updated November 2026

Most major polar data centers offer open access, but the data are spread across many of them. This guide explains the open-data rules that came out of the International Polar Years and where to search, whether you want a 140-year-old weather record or this month's sea ice extent.

The IPY data principles

Open sharing of polar data has a long history. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 already says that "scientific observations and results from Antarctica shall be exchanged and made freely available," to the greatest extent feasible. The International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 set up the World Data Centres for the same reason.

The IPY 2007–2008 Data Policy went further. It said IPY data should be "carefully and thoughtfully collected, used collaboratively, and adequately preserved," and required that "IPY data, including operational data delivered in real time, are made available fully, freely, openly, and on the shortest feasible timescale."

In plain words, that means four things:

Why IPY data are hard to find

Despite the strong policy, no central archive or portal was funded for IPY 2007–2008 data. A planned IPY Data and Information Service was retired when its funding ended. Data from the 228 IPY projects went to many national and subject-based data centers instead.

A 2015 study listed the usual problems a searcher runs into: project websites that disappear after funding ends, metadata records with no data behind them, missing units or unexplained abbreviations, and data locked inside tables in PDF papers. Expect some dead links when you follow older IPY references, and search by project name or author as well as by "IPY".

Major polar data centers

National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)
Based in the United States, NSIDC provides open-access snow, ice and related data, including NASA satellite data through the NSIDC DAAC. Use Explore Data to filter by mission or measurement, or start with the popular Sea Ice Index. It also offers data from Arctic IPY research.
Polar Data Catalogue
Created by the Canadian Cryospheric Information Network and hosted by the University of Waterloo, it serves Canadian Arctic and Antarctic research. At the time of checking it listed more than 3,000 metadata records and over 560 data sets, with map-based search and an API. It is a good place to look for Canadian polar data, including data from the IPY era.
PANGAEA
An open-access library for earth and environmental data, hosted by the Alfred Wegener Institute and MARUM at the University of Bremen, and a member of the International Science Council's World Data System. Each data set has a DOI, so it can be cited like a paper. It holds the 1,270 data sets rescued from IPY publications (search with +project:ipy) and digitized data from the first IPY of 1882–83.
Australian Antarctic Data Centre
The data center where Australia stores its Antarctic research data, including data from its IPY projects.
SCAR Antarctic Data Management System
Run by SCAR's data committee, it links the Antarctic Metadata Directory with national Antarctic data centers. The directory describes data sets and points to where they are stored; it is not itself a database of the data. Access to the directory is not restricted.
Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS)
With SCAR and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) as its governing bodies, SOOS works to make Southern Ocean observations easier to discover and use. SOOSmap is an interactive map for exploring and downloading curated observational data, and its metadata portal searches worldwide records about the Southern Ocean.

Data from the first IPY

You can work with data from 1882–83. NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory has digitized meteorological records from first-IPY stations to show the Arctic as it was before today's changes, and it lists the original station reports. PANGAEA digitized old IPY books and archived 94 data sets from the first IPY (search ipy-1). Comparing these with modern records is a strong student project; see Teaching resources.

Tips for using polar data

  1. Read the license and data policy. PANGAEA, for example, gives a license for each data set; NSIDC publishes data policies and data use and copyright pages. Free does not always mean "no conditions".
  2. Cite the DOI. Most centers issue persistent identifiers. Citing them gives credit to the people who collected the data, often in harsh conditions.
  3. Check units and coverage. A record that starts in 2000 cannot tell you about the 1950s. Check time span, region and resolution before drawing conclusions.
  4. Respect community knowledge. Observations from Indigenous and local communities are often shared under conditions set by those communities. Follow them, and see Arctic peoples for background.
  5. Start with summaries. If you are new to polar data, annual reports such as NOAA's Arctic Report Card explain what the main records show before you dig into raw files.

Sources