STAR NDSI collection: A cloud-free MODIS NDSI dataset (2001-2020) for China

Abstract

Snow dynamics are crucial in ecosystems, affecting radiation balance, hydrological cycles, biodiversity, and human activities. Snow areas with notably diverse characteristics are extensively distributed in China, mainly including Northern Xinjiang (NX), Northeast China (NC), and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP). Spatiotemporal continuous snow monitoring is indispensable for ecosystem maintenance. Nevertheless, the formidable challenge of cloud obscuration severely impedes data collection. In the past decades, abundant binary snow cover area (SCA) maps have been retrieved from moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) datasets. However, the integrated normalized difference snow index (NDSI) maps containing additional details on snow cover extent are still extremely scarce. In this study, a recent 20-year stretch seamless Terra-Aqua MODIS NDSI collection in China is generated using a Spatio-Temporal Adaptive fusion method with erroR correction (STAR), which comprehensively considers spatial and temporal contextual information. Evaluation tests confirm that the cloud-free STAR NDSI collection is superior to the two baseline datasets. The omission error decreased by 10ĝ€¯% in NX compared to the snow cover extent product, and the average correlation coefficient increased by 0.11 compared to the global cloud-gap-filled MODIS NDSI product. Consequently, this collection can serve as a basic dataset for hydrological and climatic modeling to explore various critical environmental issues in China. This collection is available from 10.5281/zenodo.5644386 (Jing et al., 2021).