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MODIS/Aqua Snow Cover 5-Min L2 Swath 500m NRT

Published by NASA/GSFC/EOS/ESDIS/LANCE MODIS | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Metadata Last Checked: February 21, 2026 | Last Modified: 2026-02-17
The MODIS/Aqua Snow Cover 5-Min L2 Swath 500m Near Real Time (NRT), short name MYD10_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. There are two separate snow fields in this data set. 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. Data are stored in HDF-EOS format.

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