Daily Canadian Snow and Inland Ice Cover Synthesis Maps

This map is intended for scientific applications requiring timely information on snow cover presence at relatively high spatial resolution and validated against Canadian in-situ snow course data sets. The restriction to a binary snow/no-snow classification will result in a decrease in agreement (~80%) with field snow course data during the melt period with higher agreement (~90%) outside this period. However, at least half of this disagreement is traceable to random errors that will tend to cancel out when the data set is aggregated spatially. The residual errors are land cover dependent typically. Users who wish to use this snow cover information to drive other models should take this error structure into consideration. This map should not be used for operational water resource assessments without some form of local cross-validation.