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.
This is the most recent version of these data.
Version Summary
1. The low visible reflectance screen for snow cover using bands 2 and 4 was lowered from 0.10 to 0.07.
2. Cloud mask algorithm flags are set for 'probably cloudy' and 'probably clear' sky conditions in the algorithm flags QA data set.
In this section
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Overview
This global Level-3 (L3) data set provides the maximum snow cover extent observed over an eight-day period within 10° x 10° MODIS sinusoidal grid tiles. Tiles are generated by compositing 500 m observations from the 'MODIS/Terra Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m Grid' data set (DOI:10.5067/MODIS/MOD10A1.061). A bit flag index is used to track the eight-day snow/no-snow chronology for each 500 m cell.
The terms "Version 61" and "Collection 6.1" are used interchangeably in reference to this release of MODIS data.
Parameter(s):
SNOW COVER
Platform(s):
Terra
Sensor(s):
MODIS
Data Format(s):
HDF-EOS2
Temporal Coverage:
18 February 2000 to present
Temporal Resolution:
8 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.
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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
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