Geospatial Data: Cold and Polar Environments

The Arctic Data Center is the primary data and software repository for the Arctic section of National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.

The Northern Canada geodatabase contains a selection of the data from the Atlas of Canada Reference Map - Northern Canada. Dataset is comprised of data for: boundaries, roads, railways, airports, seaplane bases, ports, populated places, rivers, lakes, mines, oil/natural gas fields, hydroelectric generating stations, federal protected areas, ice shelves, permanent polar sea ice limit and the treeline. Data is available in shapefile format and geodatabase format.

National Snow and Ice Centre data portal contains hundreds of scientific data sets for research, focusing on the cryosphere and its interactions. Data are from satellites and field observations.

This dataset is part of Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Shoreline Classification and Pre-Spill database and it covers various locations across the Canadian Arctic i.e. James Bay, Resolute Bay and the south coast of Devon Island, the south-west coast of Hudson Bay, Labrador Coast, Victoria Strait, Beaufort Sea, and the North-east coast of Baffin Island. Shoreline classification data has been developed for use by the Environmental Emergencies Program of Environment and Climate Change Canada for environmental protection purposes. Data is available in geodatabase format.

Dataset includes the following layers: international boundaries, provincial and territorial boundaries, national capital cities, other cities, towns, villages, hamlets, several seasonally populated places, median sea ice extent from September 1981 to 2010, the tree line, undersea relief, land relief, glaciers, ice fields and coastal ice shelves. The dataset uses the azimuthal equidistant projection and is available in Geodatabase format and MXD format.

The Permafrost Information Network is a publically accessible web portal for permafrost-related data

The Polar Data Catalogue is a database of metadata and data that describes, indexes and provides access to diverse data sets generated by Arctic and Antarctic researchers. It also contains data from the International Polar Year data project.