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Looking for facts and information? See About the Cryosphere.
Icelights: Answers to your burning questions about ice and climate
What's hot in the news around climate and sea ice and what are scientists talking about now? Read more...
What is the Cryosphere?
When scientists talk about the cryosphere, they mean the places on Earth where water is in its solid form, frozen into ice or snow. Read more ...
The MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 5-Min L2 Swath 500m (MOD10_L2) data set contains snow cover and Quality Assessment (QA) data, latitudes and longitudes in compressed Hierarchical Data Format-Earth Observing System (HDF-EOS) format, and corresponding metadata. Latitude and longitude geolocation fields are at 5 km resolution while all other fields are at 500 m resolution. Version 5 (V005), the latest version of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data available has two separate snow fields. The first field, snow cover, classifies each cloud-free land or inland water body pixel as snow-covered or snow-free, the second field, fractional snow cover, provides the percent of snow cover within each pixel for land and inland water bodies. MODIS snow cover data are based on a snow mapping algorithm that employs a Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) and other criteria tests.
N: 90, S: -90, E: 180, W: -180