Daily global snow cover map, 500 m (Terra)
What it measures. It shows where snow is on the ground each day, plus snow albedo (how much sunlight the snow reflects), at 500-meter resolution. The maps come as tiles covering the whole globe.
How it's made. Built by ESA Copernicus from NASA's MODIS instrument on Terra, turning daily satellite passes into a Level-3 daily snow-and-albedo grid.
How & where you'd use it. Valuable for tracking seasonal snowpack, forecasting spring runoff and water supply, and monitoring snow trends linked to climate.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2000-02-28 → 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 Terra MOD10A1 Version 6.1 product provides a global Level-3 daily composite of snow cover and albedo derived from the MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 5-Min L2 Swath 500 m dataset. The data are generated as daily composites and distributed in 10° × 10° tiles projected to a 500 m sinusoidal grid. Each tile contains information on snow cover extent and surface albedo derived from MODIS Terra observations, enabling consistent global monitoring of snow conditions. The terms Version 61 and Collection 6.1 are used interchangeably to refer to this MODIS data release.
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=["modis-terra-mod10a1"], # 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