Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/VJ210C1
VJ210C1·v2·dataset

Where there's snow, daily (VIIRS NOAA-21, 0.05°)

VIIRS/JPSS2 Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 0.05Deg CMG V002
cryosphere NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 active HDF-EOS5
In plain English

What it measures. The daily percentage of land covered by snow, and the percentage hidden by clouds, within roughly 5-km grid cells worldwide.

How it's made. Computed by NASA from the finer-resolution VIIRS snow-cover product on the NOAA-21 (JPSS-2) satellite, aggregated to a 0.05-degree climate-modeling grid.

How & where you'd use it. Snow-cover maps support water-supply forecasting, flood prediction, and climate studies, and the cloud percentage tells users how much of each cell was actually visible.

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 global Level-3 data set provides the percentage of snow-covered land and cloud-covered land observed daily, within 0.05° (approx. 5 km at the equator) MODIS/VIIRS Climate Modeling Grid (CMG) cells. Percentages are computed from snow cover observations in the 'VIIRS/JPSS2 Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 375m SIN Grid' data set.

Get the data

vj210c1_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VJ210C1",
    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.