AMSR2 Daily Global Snow Water Equivalent at 25 km Resolution

Snow water equivalent data provides a global daily measurement of water stored in snowpack, derived from passive microwave observations by the AMSR2 instrument on the GCOM-W1 satellite. The near real-time product is processed by NASA's LANCE system within 3 hours of observation and mapped to 25 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grids for both hemispheres. This dataset supports monitoring of the global water and energy cycle, with a science-quality version available for long-term analysis.

Use Cases

• Modeling seasonal snowmelt runoff and freshwater availability for watershed management.
• Monitoring global snow cover extent and mass for climate change studies.
• Assessing flood risk by tracking snow water equivalent accumulation in mountainous regions.
• Validating and improving snow process models using daily, gridded SWE observations.
• Studying the role of the cryosphere in the Earth's energy budget via microwave emissivity data.

Strengths

• Provides near real-time data with a latency of under 3 hours from the last observation.
• Offers global daily coverage on a consistent 25 km EASE-Grid projection for both hemispheres.
• Includes quality assurance flags to help users assess data reliability for each grid cell.
• Is produced by a dedicated NASA processing system (LANCE/AMSR SIPS) for operational use.

Limitations

• The 25 km spatial resolution is too coarse for detailed local or watershed-scale analysis.
• Passive microwave SWE retrieval can be less accurate in deep snow, complex terrain, and wet snow conditions.
• Sources conflict on license information, listing both 'other-license-specified' and 'None'.

Provenance

Source

Land Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE) at the AMSR Science Investigator-led Processing System (AMSR SIPS).

Collection Method

Passive microwave measurements from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) instrument on the GCOM-W1 satellite, processed to Level 3 daily gridded products.

Time Range

Daily coverage from the operational start of AMSR2 NRT processing; specific start date not provided.

Freshness

2026-03-12 23:02:58.013138

Geography

Global coverage for both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.