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modis-terra-mod10a2·dataset

Maximum snow cover over 8 days, 500 m (Terra)

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

What it measures. Instead of a single day, this shows the largest extent of snow seen over an 8-day period at 500-meter detail, and records the day-by-day pattern of snow and no-snow for each pixel.

How it's made. Produced by ESA Copernicus from NASA's MODIS sensor on Terra by combining the daily snow maps into an 8-day Level-3 composite.

How & where you'd use it. Handy for filling cloudy-day gaps and getting a cleaner view of snow extent, supporting water-resource planning and long-term snow monitoring.

What's measured

MODISTerraNASASatelliteGlobalSnow CoverNDSICryosphere500mMOD10A2

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2000-02-18 → 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 MOD10A2 Version 6.1 product provides a global Level-3 dataset representing the maximum snow cover extent 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/Terra Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500 m Grid dataset (MOD10A1). 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.

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-terra-mod10a2"],   # 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.