Daily lake ice cover, Northern Hemisphere (Copernicus)
What it measures. Each day it labels every patch of freshwater lakes and rivers in the Northern Hemisphere as either ice, open water, or hidden by cloud. The ice category covers all kinds of ice, including snow-topped ice.
How it's made. Built by ESA Copernicus from the SLSTR instrument aboard the Sentinel-3 satellites, updated in near real time at roughly 500-meter pixels.
How & where you'd use it. Helps track when lakes freeze and thaw, supporting flood and ice-safety warnings, winter shipping decisions, and studies of how a warming climate is changing lake ice.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2025-07-08 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-179.9999999, -59.9975, 179.9975, 80.0025
- 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 in Northern Hemisphere freshwater bodies into 1) Ice, 2) Open water, and 3) Cloud. The class Ice includes various types of ice, also snow-covered ice. The data is updated in near real-time with the spatial resolution of 500 m.
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_global_500m_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