Daily lake ice and snow map for Europe (Copernicus)
What it measures. Classifies freshwater bodies across continental Europe each day as fully snow-covered ice, partly snow-covered or bare ice, or open water, on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
How it's made. Produced by ESA Copernicus from the VIIRS instrument aboard the NOAA-20 satellite, at about 250-metre detail and in near real time.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for monitoring lake freeze and thaw cycles, supporting cold-region studies, navigation and climate tracking. This newer version runs from July 2024 to the present.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2024-07-01 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-11.00125, 35.00125, 49.99875, 72.00125
- FormatsCOG, NetCDF
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
On a daily basis, classifies pixels of Continental Europe freshwater bodies as 1) Fully snow-covered ice, 2) Partially snow-covered or snow-free ice, and 3) Open water. The data is available in near real time in a spatial resolution of 250 m and with the temporal extent from July 2024 to present, derived from NOAA-20 VIIRS.
Get the data
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client
cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
collections=["clms_lie_europe_250m_daily_v2"], # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60), # your area (W,S,E,N)
datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items()) # then read assets with rioxarray / xarrayBrowsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC