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Full catalog/AE_5DSno
AE_5DSno·v2·dataset

How much water is locked in snow (Aqua, 5-day)

AMSR-E/Aqua 5-Day L3 Global Snow Water Equivalent EASE-Grids V002
cryosphere NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 HDF-EOS2
In plain English

What it measures. How much water is stored in snow on the ground (snow water equivalent) across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, plus quality flags noting how trustworthy each reading is.

How it's made. Produced from the AMSR-E microwave sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite and mapped onto a 25 km global grid, summarized over 5-day periods.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for estimating water supply locked up in snowpack, tracking seasonal snow, and feeding water-resource and climate studies.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW WATER EQUIVALENTTERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW WATER EQUIVALENT

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-06-20 → 2011-10-03
  • Measured byAQUA (AMSR-E)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • FormatsHDF-EOS2
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Measure sea ice, snow cover and glaciers
  • Watch ice-sheet elevation change
  • Track freeze/thaw and permafrost
Official description

These Level-3 Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) data sets contain SWE data and quality assurance flags mapped to Northern and Southern Hemisphere 25 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grids (EASE-Grids).

Get the data

ae_5dsno_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AE_5DSno",
    version="2",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.