Identification

Title

Northern Hemisphere Weekly and Monthly Snow Cover

Alternative title(s)

d315000

Abstract

<p>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.</p>

Resource type

dataset

Resource locator

https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d315000/

protocol: https

name: Dataset Description

description: Related Link

function: information

https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d315000/dataaccess/

protocol: https

name: Data Access

description: Related Link

function: download

Unique resource identifier

code

codeSpace

Dataset language

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

dataset

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2021-03-30

Keyword set

keyword value

GRIDDING METHODS

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2025-10-03

Keyword set

keyword value

EARTH SCIENCE > TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE > SNOW/ICE > SNOW COVER

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2025-10-03

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

1966-11

End position

1991-12

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

1985-04-17

Frequency of update

notPlanned

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

organisation name

email address

datahelp@ucar.edu

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

organisation name

NSF NCAR Geoscience Data Exchange

email address

datahelp@ucar.edu

web address

https://gdex.ucar.edu

name: NSF NCAR Geoscience Data Exchange

description: The Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX), managed by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at NSF NCAR, contains a large collection of meteorological, atmospheric composition, and oceanographic observations, and operational and reanalysis model outputs, integrated with NSF NCAR High Performance Compute services to support atmospheric and geosciences research.

function: download

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2025-10-09T01:23:23Z

Metadata language