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Snow Cover: Overview
"Snow cover exerts a greater influence on the Earth's energy exchange than any other land surface characteristic."
- Richard Armstrong, NSIDC Senior Scientist
Snow cover, with its high albedo and low conductivity, moderates the transfer of energy at the land surface and exerts a significant effect on the inter-seasonal and inter-annual land surface water budget. Snow cover is important for initializing and updating both numerical weather prediction and hydrologic forecasting models. Improvements in methods for estimating real-time snow cover will translate into improved ability to forecast atmospheric and hydrologic variables in many regions of the world.
This indicator product is a time series of the day each year on which snow melts away at high latitudes (north of treeline). The series uses satellite passive microwave data, because the transition from dry to melting snow has a strong signal in passive microwave data and fully automated algorithms for melt detection are possible. In contrast, snow cover products that use visible band satellite imagery generally require some manual quality checking for cloud contamination.
To get a complete picture of how snow cover is changing in the northern hemisphere, visit the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab for maps of snow covered area with climatologies and anomalies, and see State of the Cryosphere for information on satellite derived snow records and the role of snow in the global energy balance. Other data products that show snow cover graphically are IMS Daily Northern Hemisphere Snow and Ice Analysis at 4 km and 24 km Resolution and Northern Hemisphere EASE-Grid Weekly Snow Cover and Sea Ice Extent.
Visit the NOAA Arctic Change pages for more information on snow and other indicators.
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