Snow Dynamics of Canada (English, WMS)

Snow Dynamics of Canada: English WMS file. From Natural Resources Canada, updated Sep 2026. View metadata, licence and the direct download on CanQuery.

Format

WMS

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Original download only

Publisher-reported update

2026-09-03

This catalog contains annual 30 m spatial resolution snow dynamics metrics for each snow-year from 2018-2019 to 2024-2025 for all of Canada. We gather all Landsat and Sentinel-2 images collected over Canada and identify the status of each pixel observation on the image collection date: snow (and ice), non-snow (i.e., land, water), unclear (i.e., clouds, shadows). We built an algorithm to calculate snow cover metrics for each pixel during each winter: start date of the first (and biggest) snow period [startF, startB], end date of the last (and biggest) snow period [endL, endB], number of days with snow cover in total (or in the biggest snow period) [lengthT, lengthB], number of snow periods (i.e., separated times with multiple confirmed snow observations) [periods], and a status classification (e.g., continuous snow, snow free) [status]. We do not obtain a clear observation every day because of satellite orbit frequencies and clouds. This means that timing-based metrics are identified by the middle date between two clear observations, with uncertainty quantified as half the length of the gap (i.e., ± days) [startF_u, startB_u, endL_u, endB_u, lengthT_u, lengthB_u].

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