Research led by the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) has demonstrated the effectiveness of a new dataset in estimating the gridded daily snow mass for non-alpine regions in the northern hemisphere.
Published in the open-access journal Scientific Data, the paper provides a detailed description of the GlobSnow v3.0 dataset and its methodology, and how it was used for the reliable estimation of annual snow mass and snow cover changes in the northern hemisphere.
GlobSnow provides a state-of-the-art estimation of the hemispheric snow mass containing daily, monthly and monthly bias-corrected snow water equivalent (SWE) at the nominal resolution of 25 x 25km (EASE-Grid).
The quantitative accuracy characteristics of the data record have been evaluated through comparisons against approximately 300,000 independent snow course observations of SWE from Eurasia and North America.
The development of the GlobSnow methodology is continuing as part of the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative – Snow (Snow CCI) project.
In 2020, the GlobSnow v3.0 dataset was successfully used in the reliable estimation of the amount of annual snow mass and changes in snow cover in the northern hemisphere between 1980 and 2018.
During the research period, snow mass remained the same in Eurasia and decreased in North America, although the extent of snow cover has decreased simultaneously in both continental regions.
To read the full publication in the open-access journal Scientific Data, click here.