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Northern Hemisphere Weekly and Monthly Snow Cover

d315000
| DOI: 10.5065/3842-MY85
 
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Abstract:

The U.S. National Earth Satellite Service (NESS) created hand-drawn Northern Hemisphere maps of snow and ice boundaries on a weekly basis starting in 1966. A satellite meteorologist would use visible satellite data to determine the change in snow and ice boundaries from the previous week, and confirm any drastic changes with surface station observations. Since these maps were the only complete record of snow and ice extent, providing spatially-continuous coverage versus the historical daily point observations taken mainly in populated areas, they were digitized by the Climatology Program at the University of Nebraska onto a 190.5 km resolution polar-stereographic grid, and then objectively analyzed to produce various other snow cover products.

Temporal Range:
1966-11 to 1991-12
Variables:
Snow Cover
Vertical Levels:
Ground or water surface
Temporal Frequencies:
Every week , Every month
Data Types:
Grid
Spatial Coverage:
Longitude Range: Westernmost=180W Easternmost=180E
Latitude Range: Southernmost=2.378S Northernmost=90N Detailed coverage information
Data Contributors:
DOC/NOAA/NESDIS/OSDPD/SSD
Satellite Services Division, Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution, NESDIS, NOAA, U.S. Department of Commerce
 |  NASA NSIDC DAAC
NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center
Publications:
Dewey, K. F. and Heim Jr., R., 1982: A Digital Archive of Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover, November 1966 through December 1980. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 63(10), 1132-1141.
Dewey, K.F., and R. Heim, Jr., 1981: Satellite observations of variations in Northern Hemisphere seasonal snow cover. Technical Report NESS 87, NOAA, 83 pp.
Total Volume:
16.22 MB
Data Formats:
ASCII (see dataset documentation)
Metadata Record:
Data License:
Data LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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