How much snow is on the ground out West (daily) — WUS_UCLA_SR

In plain English

What it measures. Estimates how much snow is on the ground across the Western United States each day, including the water held in the snow, the snow depth, and how much of the area is snow-covered.

How it's made. Built as a reanalysis that combines a snow model with satellite observations from the Landsat series, producing daily estimates at about 500-meter detail back to 1985.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for water-supply planning, drought and flood forecasting, and studying decades of snowpack change across the mountainous West.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW DEPTHCRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW WATER EQUIVALENT

Coverage & cadence

Time span1984-10-01 → 2021-09-30
Measured byLANDSAT-5 (TM) · LANDSAT-7 (ETM+) · LANDSAT-8 (OLI)
Processing levelLevel 4
Spatial extent-125, 31, -102, 49
FormatsnetCDF-4 classic, PNG
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 Western United States snow reanalysis data set contains daily estimates of posterior snow water equivalent (SWE), fractional snow-covered area (fSCA) and snow depth (SD) at 16 arc-second (~500 m) resolution from water years 1985 to 2021. This data set was developed to be compared to SnowEx data sets but its utility reaches beyond that since its spatial and temporal bounds extend over the entire Western U.S. and over several decades.

Get the data

wus_ucla_sr_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="WUS_UCLA_SR",
    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_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