•  On Wednesday, June 7, from 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. (US Mountain Time), the following data collections may not be available due to planned system maintenance: ASO, AMSR Unified, AMSR-E, Aquarius, High Mountain Asia, IceBridge, ICESat/GLAS, ICESat-2, LVIS, MEaSUREs, MODIS, Nimbus, SMAP, SnowEx, SSM/I-SSMIS and VIIRS.

  • As of February 25th, 2023, C6 Forward processing of Terra and Aqua MODIS Land data products has been discontinued, due to calibration issues that were discovered after the completion of the C6 reprocessing. The Collection 6.1 (C61) corrects these calibration issues and has a number of product specific improvements and enhancements that are listed in the C61 change document here. Given the improved performance and calibration of C61, users are requested to switch to C61 for all of their MODIS land data needs. NSIDC will retain the C6 historical land data products for a further period of 6 months, following this decommissioning of the C6 forward processing, and will decommission all C6 land data products after the expiry of this 6-month retention period.

MODIS/Terra Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m SIN Grid, Version 6 (MOD10A1)
Data set:
MOD10A1
There is a more recent version of these data.
Version Summary
Changes for Version 6 include:

  • Fractional Snow Cover has been replaced by Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) snow cover. Fractional Snow Cover is no longer calculated;

  • The binary Snow-Covered Area (SCA) map has been discontinued;

  • Existing data screens designed to reduce snow detection errors have been revised and several new screens have been added;

  • Data screen results, including snow detection reversals and detections with increased uncertainty, are provided in a new QA bit flag;

  • Basic pixel-level QA uses new criteria to indicate the overall quality of algorithm result;

  • Pointers are provided to locate the swaths used for each day's observation.

Overview

This data set contains daily, gridded snow cover and albedo derived from radiance data acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board the Terra satellite. Snow cover is identified using the Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) and a series of screens designed to alleviate errors and flag uncertain snow cover detections.
Parameter(s):
ALBEDO SNOW COVER
Platform(s):
TERRA
Sensor(s):
MODIS
Data Format(s):
HDF-EOS2
Temporal Coverage:
24 February 2000 to 17 February 2023
Temporal Resolution:
1 day
Spatial Resolution:
500 m
500 m
Spatial Coverage:
N:
90
S:
-90
E:
180
W:
-180
Yellow areas on the map below indicate the spatial coverage for this data set.

Data Access & Tools

A free NASA Earthdata Login account is required to access these data. Learn More

Help Articles

Getting started

For the snow cover and sea ice products, users can use MODIS Collections 6 and 6.1 together.
OPeNDAP, the Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol, is a NASA community standard DAP that provides a simple way for researchers to access and work with data over the internet.
The lag time between observations and availability of MODIS products is only a few days. Lag time may be extended due to satellite maneuvers and extra quality assurance required for the geolocation data after the maneuver.
This short article describes the customization services available for ICESat-2 data using Earthdata Search
The Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) snow cover is an index that is related to the presence of snow in a pixel and is a more accurate description of snow detection as compared to Fractional Snow Cover (FSC). Snow typically has very high visible (VIS) reflectance and very low reflectance in

How To

Many NSIDC DAAC data sets can be accessed using the NSIDC DAAC's Data Access Tool. This tool provides the ability to search and filter data with spatial and temporal constraints using a map-based interface. Users have the option to
To convert HDF5 files into binary format you will need to use the h5dump utility, which is part of the HDF5 distribution available from the HDF Group. How you install HDF5 depends on your operating system.
This step-by-step tutorial demonstrates how to access MODIS and SMAP data using the Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AppEEARS). AppEEARS allows users to access, explore, and download point and area data with spatial, temporal, and parameter subsets.
The "Snow Depth and Snow Cover Data Exploration” Jupyter Notebook provides Python code to access and compare coincident snow data across in-situ, airborne, and satellite platforms from NASA's SnowEx, ASO, and MODIS data sets, respectively.
Data subscriptions are available for select NSIDC DAAC data collections. Once signed up, the subscription service automatically sends you new data as they are delivered from active NASA satellite missions.
All data from the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) can be accessed directly from our HTTPS file system, using wget or curl. Basic command line instructions are provided in the article below. 
NASA Earthdata Search is a map-based interface where a user can search for Earth science data, filter results based on spatial and temporal constraints, and order data with customizations including re-formatting, re-projecting, and spatial and parameter subsetting.
NASA Worldview is a map interface that allows users to interactively browse imagery, create visualizations, and download the underlying data.
NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) provides up to date, full resolution imagery for selected NSIDC DAAC data sets.