Where snow is on the ground (Terra, 8-day, 500 m) — MOD10A2

In plain English

What it measures. The greatest extent of snow on the ground seen over each eight-day window, mapped worldwide at 500-meter detail, with a record of which days within the period had snow.

How it's made. Built by combining daily snow-cover observations from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Terra satellite into eight-day composites on a global grid.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for monitoring seasonal snowpack, managing water supplies that depend on snowmelt, and studying snow trends over time.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW COVER

Coverage & cadence

Time span2000-02-18 → ongoing
Measured byTerra (MODIS)
Processing levelLevel 3
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsHDF-EOS2
StatusACTIVE

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

This global Level-3 (L3) data set provides the maximum snow cover extent observed over an eight-day period within 10° x 10° MODIS sinusoidal grid tiles. Tiles are generated by compositing 500 m observations from the 'MODIS/Terra Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m Grid' data set (DOI:10.5067/MODIS/MOD10A1.061). A bit flag index is used to track the eight-day snow/no-snow chronology for each 500 m cell. The terms "Version 61" and "Collection 6.1" are used interchangeably in reference to this release of MODIS data.

Get the data

mod10a2_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="MOD10A2",
    version="61",
    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.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links