Where snow covers the ground each day, from NASA's MODIS sensor on the Aqua satellite (~5 km detail)

In plain English

What it measures. The daily percentage of land covered by snow, and how much was hidden by clouds, mapped worldwide in roughly 5 km cells.

How it's made. Built by summarizing the finer 500-meter daily snow-cover readings from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite into a coarser climate-grid product.

How & where you'd use it. Used for tracking snow cover over time, water-supply forecasting, and climate research.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SNOW/ICE › SNOW COVER

Coverage & cadence

Time span2002-07-04 → ongoing
Measured byAqua (MODIS)
Processing levelLevel 3
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsHDF-EOS2
StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

Measure sea ice, snow cover and glaciers
Watch ice-sheet elevation change
Track freeze/thaw and permafrost

Official description

This global Level-3 (L3) data set provides the percentage of snow-covered land and cloud-covered land observed daily, within 0.05° (approx. 5 km) MODIS Climate Modeling Grid (CMG) cells. Percentages are computed from snow cover observations in the 'MODIS/Aqua Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m Grid' data set (DOI:10.5067/MODIS/MYD10A1.061). The terms "Version 61" and "Collection 6.1" are used interchangeably in reference to this release of MODIS data.

Get the data

myd10c1_access.py

import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="MYD10C1",
    version="61",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

Official links

Search and order NASA Earth Science data using spatial and temporal filters. Reformatting, reprojecting, and subsetting options are available for some data sets. GET DATA
Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. GET DATA
Search data by spatial and/or temporal ranges or file name. Choose from various download options, including a Python script. GET DATA
A Python library to search and access NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code GET DATA
Find more data access options and help resources. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
MODIS/Aqua Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 0.05Deg CMG, Version 61 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
MODIS Grids and Tile Locators VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
MODIS Snow Products Collection 6.1 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION