Snow, ice & glaciers
Snow cover from satellites, snow depth and water equivalent from stations, sea-ice extent, and glaciers measured from imagery and elevation models.
Snow and ice are measured three ways, and they rarely agree exactly. Stations weigh the snowpack or measure its depth at a point; satellites see the top of the snow, or the trees above it, from orbit; and sea-ice records count grid cells over a hemisphere. Each comes with its own units, calendars, codes and blind spots.
The guides here work with the real records: NSIDC's sea-ice index since 1978, SNOTEL snow pillows in the Colorado Rockies, a century of GHCN-Daily snow depth in Boulder, and MODIS and Sentinel-2 snow maps checked against the ground. Several of the answers are modest — a station with no trend, a satellite that runs early under forest — and they are reported as measured.
The concepts explain extent versus area, snow water equivalent and the snow index; the how-to guides build time series and maps; and the fixes cover the codes, gaps and projections that trip up every first attempt.
🧭 Start with the concepts
The ideas the how-to guides below assume you already have.
⚙️ Then do the task
Step-by-step walkthroughs with code you can copy and adapt.
- How to Analyse a Sea-Ice Extent Time Series in Python
- How to Analyse SNOTEL Snow Water Equivalent in Python
- How to Analyse Snow Depth from GHCN-Daily in Python
- How to Make a MODIS Snow Cover Time Series in Python
- How to Map Sea-Ice Concentration in Python
- How to Compute Glacier Hypsometry from a DEM in Python
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🔧 When it breaks
The errors this topic produces, with the cause explained rather than just the command.
Related topics
Subjects that keep coming up alongside this one, most overlap first.