Near Real-Time MODIS Snow Cover and Properties for Western U.S., 2024-Present

From 01 October 2024 to present, this dataset provides daily, spatially and temporally complete snow parameters for the western United States. It is derived from MODIS/Terra satellite data using the SPIReS spectral mixture analysis model and includes snow fraction, albedo, grain size, dust concentration, and radiative forcing. The data is produced by NASA and provided in netCDF-4 format with a Sinusoidal projection.

Use Cases

• Modeling snowmelt runoff and water resource availability based on snow cover duration and fraction.
• Assessing radiative forcing and climate impacts using derived snow albedo and dust concentration.
• Monitoring snowpack properties like grain size and dust for avalanche or ecological studies.
• Validating and improving snow property inversion algorithms using the SPIReS methodology.

Strengths

• Data is spatially and temporally complete after interpolation, filling observation gaps.
• Includes multiple derived snow properties (fraction, albedo, grain size, dust, radiative forcing) from a single spectral model.
• Provides a 'days without observation' variable to track satellite observation recency.

Limitations

• Geographic coverage is currently limited to five MODIS tiles in the western United States.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Derived from MOD09GA v6.1 surface reflectance using the Snow Property Inversion from Remote Sensing (SPIReS) spectral mixture analysis model.

Time Range

01 October 2024 to present

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-12 23:16:08.740631; data is near real-time from 2024-present.

Geography

Western United States (MODIS tiles h08v04, h08v05, h09v04, h09v05, h10v04)