NASA Gridded SWE and snow depth

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Suggestion from Will Weider @wwieder

Data citation:
P. Broxton, X. Zeng, N. Dawson, Daily 4 km Gridded SWE and Snow Depth from Assimilated In-Situ and Modeled Data over the Conterminous US, Version 1. Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/10.5067/0GGPB220EX6A. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center

X. Zeng, P. Broxton, N. Dawson, Snowpack Change From 1982 to 2016 Over Conterminous United States. Geophysical Research Letters 45, 12,940-912,947 (2018).

The data only covers CONUS, but is relatively high resolution (4km) and at a daily interval. For direct use in the current ILAMB methodology, we should coarsen to monthly. Alternatively we could write custom analysis to make use of the higher temporal information. If the appropriate variable for snow thickness is sisnthick, then there are several models in ESGF with daily historical data. I think the same variable on a monthly scale is known as snd and there are models with this data.

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From Jing Tao:

The SWE dataset I'm using is GlobSnow v3.0 bias-corrected monthly SWE, produced by ESA (see Pulliainen et al., 2020 for the Nature paper and Luojus et al., 2021 for the dataset paper). It is a spatially gridded product that combines satellite-based passive microwave radiometer data (Nimbus-7 SMMR, DMSP SSM/I and DMSP SSMIS) and ground measurements, covering the Northern Hemisphere from 1980 to 2014. We don't usually use snow depth because it is not a good variable to indicate snow mass which is the key variable that matters for snow thermal conductivity (for our purpose) or water resource purpose. The GlobSnowv3 data (the lat-long gridded version, or SnowCCI) has been used to benchmark CMIP6 models over NH (https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/16/1007/2022/tc-16-1007-2022.html). ILAMB uses CanSISE (Canadian Sea Ice and Snow Evolution) SWE data, but this is a quite old dataset and only covers 1981 to 2010, and I believe the bias-corrected GlobSnow v3 would be superior to CanSISE in many areas.

Pulliainen, J., Luojus, K., Derksen, C., Mudryk, L., Lemmetyinen, J., Salminen, M., Ikonen, J., Takala, M., Cohen, J., Smolander, T. and Norberg, J. 2020. Patterns and trends of Northern Hemisphere snow mass from 1980 to 2018 (vol 41, pg 861, 2020). Nature.
Luojus, K., Pulliainen, J., Takala, M., Lemmetyinen, J., Mortimer, C., Derksen, C., Mudryk, L., Moisander, M., Hiltunen, M., Smolander, T. and Ikonen, J., 2021. GlobSnow v3. 0 Northern Hemisphere snow water equivalent dataset. Scientific Data, 8(1), p.163.