Where there's snow, gap-filled (NOAA-21, 375 m, daily)

In plain English

What it measures. A daily, global map of where snow is on the ground, with a twist: spots hidden under clouds are filled in with a best estimate of the snow likely beneath them, so the map has no cloud gaps.

How it's made. Built from the VIIRS instrument on the NOAA-21 satellite, using a cloud-gap-filling method, and mapped to a 375-meter grid.

How & where you'd use it. Helpful for tracking snow cover for water-supply forecasting, flood planning, and climate studies, with the convenience of a gap-free daily picture.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW COVER

Coverage & cadence

Time span2023-02-10 → ongoing
Measured byJPSS-2 (VIIRS) · NOAA-21 (VIIRS)
Processing levelLevel 3
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsHDF-EOS5
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 data set contains daily 'cloud-free' snow cover produced from the VIIRS/JPSS-2 Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 375m SIN Grid, Version 2 snow cover product. A cloud-gap-filled algorithm is utilized to replace ‘cloud-covered’ pixels with ‘cloud-free pixels’ for the purpose of estimating the snow cover that may exist under current cloud cover. The data are provided daily and mapped to a 375 m sinusoidal grid.

Get the data

vj210a1f_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VJ210A1F",
    version="2",
    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