GlobSnow Snow Extent (SE)

The GlobSnow SE processing system applies optical measurements in the visual-to-thermal part of the electromagnetic spectrum acquired by the ERS-2 sensor ATSR-2 and the Envisat sensor AATSR. The snow cover information is retrieved by a semi-empirical SCAmod-algorithm (Metsamaki et al.2012). Clouds are detected by a cloud-cover retrieval algorithm (SCDA, developed for GlobSnow purposes) and masked out. Large water bodies (ocean and lakes) are also masked out. The resulting product is provided in a latitude-longitude grid with a 0.01degree spatial resolution (approximately 1 km) covering the Northern Hemisphere from 25°N to 84°N, which corresponds to the seasonally snow covered land areas of the Northern Hemisphere.