High-Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring; Persistent Snow Area

Short description

The Persistent Snow Area (PSA) product is generated annually from FSC products and provides the extent of persistent snow cover for that year (the area where snow is present throughout the hydrological year).The Persistent Snow Area (PSA) product is generated annually from FSC products and provides the extent of persistent snow cover for that year (the area where snow is present throughout the hydrological year). The PSA corresponds to pixels with a snow probability greater than 0.95, i.e. where snow was observed in at least 95% of the observations (under clear-sky conditions). For optimisation reasons, the retrieval methodology assumes that the minimal snow cover is reached across Europe between 1 May and 30 September; thus the algorithm performs the aggregation only over this period.

Band information

Band Name Sample Type Expected Values Description
PSA UINT 8 0 - no persistent snow, 1 - persistent snow, 255 - no data Persistent snow area
QC UINT8 0 - high quality, 1 - medium quality, 2 - low quality, 3 - minimal quality, 255 - no data Persistent snow area quality layer

More information

More information about the HR-S&I snow production workflows that highlights the dependencies between the diferent products and how they are derived can be found here.

Representative Images

PSA over the Mont Blanc Region, FR PSA over the Mont Blanc Region, FR.