This dataset contains Daily Snow Cover Fraction (snow on ground) from ATSR-2, produced by the Snow project of the ESA Climate Change Initiative programme.

Snow cover fraction on ground (SCFG) iindicates the area of snow observed from space on land surfaces, in forested areas corrected for the transparency (“transmissivity”) of the forest canopy. The SCFG is given in percentage (%) per grid cell.

The global SCFG product is available at 0.01° grid size (about 1 km) for all land areas, excluding Antarctica and Greenland ice sheet. The coastal zones of Greenland are included.

The SCFG time series provides daily products for the period 1995 – 2003.

The SCFG product is based on Along-Track Scanning Radiometer 2 (ATSR-2) data aboard the ERS-2 satellite.

The retrieval method of the snow_cci SCFG product from ATSR-2 data has been further developed and improved based on the ESA GlobSnow approach (Metsämäki et al. 2015) and complemented with a pre-classification module. In a first step, clouds are masked using an adapted version of the Simple Cloud Detection Algorithm version 2.0 (SCDA2.0) (Metsämäki et al. 2015), defined as SCDA2.3. All cloud-free pixels are then used for the snow extent mapping, using spectral bands centred at about 659 nm and 1.61 µm, and an emissive band centred at about 10.85 µm. The snow_cci snow cover mapping algorithm is a two-step approach: first, a strict pre-classification is applied to identify all cloud-free pixels which are clearly snow free. For all remaining pixels, the snow_cci SCFG retrieval method is applied.

Improvements to the GlobSnow algorithm implemented for snow_cci version 1 include the usage of a global forest transmissivity map developed and created within snow_cci based on forest density from Hansen et al. (2013) and forest type layers from Land Cover CCI (Defourny 2019). The forest transmissivity map provides the local transparency of the forest canopy and is applied or estimating the fractional snow cover on the ground.

Permanent snow and ice, and water areas are masked based on the Land Cover CCI data set of the year 2000. Both classes were separately aggregated to the grid size of the SCFG product. Water areas are masked if more than 30% of the grid cell is classified as water, permanent snow and ice areas are masked if more than 50% is identified as such areas in the aggregated map. The product uncertainty for observed land areas is provided as unbiased root mean square error (RMSE) per grid cell in the ancillary variable.

The SCFG product aims to serve the needs of users working with the cryosphere and climate research and monitoring activities, including the assessment of variability and trends, climate modelling and aspects of hydrology, meteorology, and biology.

The Norwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral, NR) is responsible for the SCFG product development and generation from ATSR-2 data. The Remote Sensing Research Group of the University of Bern supported the development. ENVEO IT GmbH developed and prepared all auxiliary data sets used for the product generation.

There are a few days without any ATSR-2 acquisitions in the years 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003.