NASA SnowEx Project: Airborne and Satellite Snow Depth and Water Equivalent Data

Multi-year airborne and satellite survey campaigns collected snow depth and snow water equivalent data for mountainous regions in the Western U.S., including Grand Mesa, Colorado. The data set includes 3-meter and 50-meter gridded snow depths from lidar, 50-meter snow water equivalent, and fractional snow-covered area maps from WorldView imagery. Data were collected by NASA/JPL's Airborne Snow Observatory and other satellite platforms, with some measurements coinciding with the 2017 NASA SnowEx field campaign.

Use Cases

• Modeling snow water equivalent for hydrological forecasting based on lidar-derived snow depth and modeled density data.
• Validating satellite snow depth retrieval algorithms based on high-resolution stereo imagery and coincident in-situ measurements.
• Analyzing fractional snow-covered area dynamics based on downsampled binary snow maps from WorldView-2/3 imagery.
• Generating bare-earth digital elevation models for snow-off baseline comparisons based on airborne lidar surveys.

Strengths

• Includes very-high-resolution data products at 3-meter and 50-meter grid scales.
• Provides a time series of snow depth maps from 2016 to 2022 for specific study areas.
• Combines multiple data sources: airborne lidar, WorldView-2/3, Pléiades satellite imagery, and Landsat/MODSCAG products.
• Contains data temporally aligned with a major field campaign (2017 NASA SnowEx) for validation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Spatial coverage is limited to specific mountainous study sites in the Western U.S.

Provenance

Source

NASA/JPL Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) and NASA SnowEx project.

Collection Method

Airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) surveys and very-high-resolution satellite stereo imagery.

Time Range

Data collected during multi-year campaigns, with a mentioned time series from 2016 to 2022.

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Mountainous study sites in the Western U.S., including Grand Mesa and Banded Peak Ranch, Colorado.