NASA VIIRS-SNPP Project: Daily Global Snow Cover at 375m Resolution

Daily global snow cover maps at 375-meter resolution are generated from the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on two polar-orbiting satellites. A cloud-gap-filled algorithm estimates snow cover under clouds by replacing cloud-covered pixels with cloud-free ones. The data is produced by NASA and available under a CC-BY-4.0 license on AWS Open Data.

Use Cases

• Monitoring seasonal snowpack extent and melt timing based on daily global snow cover layers.
• Validating climate and hydrological models using the Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) data.
• Analyzing cloud persistence and its impact on snow observation based on the Cloud_Persistence data layer.
• Studying long-term snow cover trends from daily, cloud-gap-filled global composites.

Strengths

• Data is provided daily, enabling high temporal resolution analysis.
• Spatial resolution is 375 meters, offering detailed global coverage.
• Utilizes a cloud-gap-filled algorithm to reduce data gaps from cloud cover.
• Derived from the VIIRS instrument on two operational satellite platforms (JPSS-1 and Suomi NPP).

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.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NASA

Collection Method

Derived from radiance data acquired by the VIIRS instrument on the JPSS-1 and Suomi NPP satellites, processed using the Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) and quality screens.

Time Range

Daily coverage, specific date range unknown.

Freshness

Daily

Geography

Global