Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover Timing and Statistics 1972-2000

NASA's 29-year time series provides annual snow cover data for Northern Hemisphere land areas above 45 degrees North. It contains gridded variables for the week of snow disappearance, week of snow cover onset, and duration of the snow-free period, along with summary statistics of their mean and standard deviation. The dataset is available in formats including BIN, ISO, and HTML.

Use Cases

• Analyzing interannual variability in snow disappearance week for climate trend detection.
• Modeling snow cover onset timing to study phenological impacts on ecosystems.
• Calculating the duration of the snow-free period for hydrological runoff forecasting.
• Using gridded mean and standard deviation statistics for spatial pattern validation of climate models.

Strengths

• Provides a consistent 29-year time series from 1972 to 2000.
• Includes derived summary statistics (mean and standard deviation grids) for key parameters.
• Cross-platform presence on Data.gov and NASA EarthData signals its established importance.

Limitations

• Sources conflict on last updated date: Data.gov shows 2026-03-12 (likely a placeholder), while NASA EarthData shows 2000-12 31.
• Specific row counts, column names, and dataset size are not provided by any source.
• License is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' on Data.gov, with no details on NASA EarthData.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Gridded annual observations derived from satellite or ground-based data.

Time Range

1972 to 2000

Freshness

2000-12-31 23:59:59.999000

Geography

Northern Hemisphere, primarily land areas above 45 degrees North