A Digital Archive of Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover, November 1966 through December 1980

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to acquaint the research community with a new data base?a digitized archive of Northern Hemisphere snow cover. Historically, those researchers who needed snow cover data for climatic and atmospheric boundary layer studies have had to rely on the irregularly spaced (and in some regions, sparse)grid of point observations. Northern Hemisphere Weekly Snow and Ice Cover Charts, which are created from analyzed satellite imagery at the National Earth Satellite Service (NESS), have been available on an operational basis since late 1966. Each of these weekly charts for the period November 1966 through December 1980 was digitized and stored in a new data archive. Snow cover area and snow cover frequency climatologies were created and examples are presented. The significance of this unique data archive is examined by comparing the 14-year mean annual snow cover frequency climatology with several published snow cover climatologies. The potential uses for this data archive in meteorological and climatological studies also are reviewed.