Lake ice cover archive 2021-2025 (Copernicus)
What it measures. A daily record marking northern lakes and rivers as ice-covered, open water, or obscured by cloud, with the ice class including snow-covered ice. This earlier version spans April 2021 through August 2025.
How it's made. Produced by ESA Copernicus using the Sentinel-3 SLSTR sensor at about 500-meter resolution, delivered in near real time during its active period.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for looking back at four winters of freeze-up and break-up timing, comparing seasons, and feeding climate and hydrology research on northern lakes.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2021-04-01 → 2026-03-31
- Spatial extent-179.9999999, 25.0025, 179.9975, 84.0025
- 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 and with a temporal extent from April 2021 to August 2025.
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_northernhemisphere_500m_daily_v1"], # 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