How much sunlight snow reflects (SnowEx, 2023)
What it measures. Field measurements of how much sunlight snow surfaces bounce back (their reflectance and overall albedo), gathered across forests, burned areas, and meadows near Fairbanks, Alaska.
How it's made. Hand-collected on the ground using a spectrometer during the SnowEx 2023 campaign in April and May, across three boreal landscape types.
How & where you'd use it. Helps scientists understand how vegetation and burn history change snow's brightness, which affects how much sunlight high-latitude snow absorbs versus reflects—an important factor in northern climate.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2023-04-05 → 2023-05-05
- Measured byGROUND-BASED OBSERVATIONS (SPECTRORADIOMETERS)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-147.7298, 63.86191, -145.7231, 65.16127
- FormatsCSV
- StatusCOMPLETE
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 data set contains a comprehensive set of field-based measurements of snow surface reflectance and broadband snow albedo collected during the NASA SnowEx 2023 field campaign in interior Alaska. Data were acquired in April and May 2023 across three study sites near Fairbanks, Alaska, selected to represent the dominant boreal landcover types: closed-canopy forests, recently and historically burned forests, and open meadows. Together, these environments capture the heterogeneity of snow–vegetation interactions that influence snow albedo in high-latitude ecosystems.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="SNEX23_Albedo",
version="1",
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_CPRDBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. GET DATA
- Search and order NASA Earth Science data using spatial and temporal filters. Reformatting, reprojecting, and subsetting options are available for some data sets. GET DATA
- Search data by spatial and/or temporal ranges or file name. Choose from various download options, including a Python script. GET DATA
- A Python library to search and access NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code GET DATA
- Find more data access options and help resources. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- SnowEx23 Apr23 Spectrometer Snow Surface Reflectance and Albedo, Version 1 Technical Reference VIEW RELATED INFORMATION