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Description
This data set reports the maximum snow cover extent during an eight-day period in 1200 km x 1200 km tiles. Tiles are generated by compositing 500 m observations from the MODIS/Terra Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m Grid (MOD10A1) data set. Bit flags are also provided that report the eight-day snow/no-snow chronology for each 500 m cell.
As of August 2023, this data set is retired and no longer available for download. We recommend using <a href="https://nsidc.org/data/mod10a2/versions/61">MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 8-Day L3 Global 500m SIN Grid, Version 61</a> as an alternative.
Version Description
Changes for Version 6 include:
Fractional Snow Cover (FSC) previously used as input to this data set has been replaced by Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) snow cover;
Citation is critically important for dataset documentation and discovery. This dataset is openly shared, without restriction, in accordance with the EOSDIS Data Use and Citation Guidance.
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Hall, D. K., & Riggs, G. A. (2015). MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 8-Day L3 Global 500m SIN Grid, Version 6 [Dataset]. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD10A2.006 Date Accessed: 2026-08-02
Hall, D. K., & Riggs, G. A. (2015). MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 8-Day L3 Global 500m SIN Grid, Version 6 [Dataset]. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD10A2.006 Date Accessed: 2026-08-02
Hall, Dorothy K., and George A. Riggs. “MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 8-Day L3 Global 500m SIN Grid, Version 6.” NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center, 2015, https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD10A2.006. Date Accessed: 2026-08-02
Peterson, David A., Kampf, Stephanie K., PuntenneyDesmond, Kira C., Fairchild, Matthew P., Zipper, Sam, Hammond, John C., Ross, Matthew R. V., Sears, Megan G.
Leaf Area Index (LAI), Fraction Of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fapar), Vegetation Index, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Snow Cover
Caldwell, Timothy J., Chandra, Sudeep, Albright, Thomas P., Harpold, Adrian A., Dilts, Thomas E., Greenberg, Jonathan A., Sadro, Steve, Dettinger, Michael D.
Yi, Yonghong, Kimball, John S., Watts, Jennifer D., Natali, Susan M., Zona, Donatella, Liu, Junjie, Ueyama, Masahito, Kobayashi, Hideki, Oechel, Walter, Miller, Charles E.