Where there's snow, daily (VIIRS Suomi-NPP, 0.05°)

In plain English

What it measures. The daily percentage of land covered by snow (and by clouds) within roughly 5-kilometer grid cells across the globe.

How it's made. Computed from a finer-resolution VIIRS snow-cover product on the Suomi-NPP satellite by summarizing it into larger climate-modeling grid cells.

How & where you'd use it. Helps track snow extent for water-supply forecasting, flood and drought planning, and climate studies.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › CLOUDS › CLOUD PROPERTIES › CLOUD FRACTIONCRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW COVER

Coverage & cadence

Time span2012-01-19 → ongoing
Measured bySuomi-NPP (VIIRS)
Processing levelLevel 3
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsHDF-EOS5
StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
Feed weather and air-quality analysis

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) MODIS/VIIRS Climate Modeling Grid (CMG) cells. Percentages are computed from snow cover observations in the 'VIIRS/NPP Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 375m SIN Grid' data set (DOI:10.5067/45VDCKJBXWEE).

Get the data

vnp10c1_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="VNP10C1",
    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.

Official links

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
Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. 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
VIIRS/NPP Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 0.05Deg CMG, Version 2 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
SNPP/JPSS1 VIIRS Snow Cover Products Collection 2 User Guide [2021] VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
VIIRS Bands and Bandwidths VIEW RELATED INFORMATION