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Full catalog/modis-aqua-myd10a2
modis-aqua-myd10a2·dataset

Largest 8-day snow extent worldwide at 500m (Copernicus)

MODIS Aqua Snow Cover 8-Day L3 Global 500m
cryosphere ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. Summarises the maximum area covered by snow over each eight-day window and records the day-by-day snow-and-bare pattern within that period, at 500-metre detail.

How it's made. Built by combining the daily Aqua MODIS snow maps from NASA into 8-day composites on a 500-metre global grid.

How & where you'd use it. Smooths out daily cloud gaps to give a cleaner picture of snow cover, useful for water resource planning, climate research, and seasonal snow tracking.

What's measured

MODISAquaNASASatelliteGlobalSnow CoverNDSICryosphere500mMYD10A2

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2002-07-04 → ongoing
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90

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

The MODIS Aqua MYD10A2 Version 6.1 product provides a global Level-3 dataset representing the maximum snow cover extent (SNE) observed over an eight-day period. The data are distributed in 10° × 10° tiles projected to a 500 m MODIS sinusoidal grid. Each tile is generated by compositing 500 m observations from the MODIS/Aqua Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500 m Grid dataset (MYD10A1). A bit-flag index is used to record the eight-day snow and no-snow chronology for each 500 m pixel, allowing users to track the temporal pattern of snow cover within the compositing period. The terms Version 61 and Collection 6.1 are used interchangeably to refer to this MODIS data release.

Get the data

copernicus_access.py
# 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=["modis-aqua-myd10a2"],   # 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 / xarray
Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.