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Annual End-of-Summer Snow Cover on Glaciers in Alaska and Northwest Canada

Published by U.S. Geological Survey | Department of the Interior | Catalog Last Checked: August 01, 2026 at 03:54 AM | Dataset Last Updated: August 01, 2024 at 12:00 AM
This dataset contains observations of the distribution of end-of-summer snow cover on approximately 3000 glaciers across Alaska and Northwest Canada. The data are provided as: (1) GeoTIFF rasters indicating the spatial extent of end-of-summer snow cover on each glacier's surface in each year (one raster per glacier per year), and (2) yearly tables with the equilibrium line altitude and the accumulation area ratio of the glaciers derived from the snow cover extent geotiffs. Snow cover was identified in Sentinel-2 imagery using a random forest algorithm trained with a manually-created validation dataset. A series of post-processing steps were used to infill missing data from terrain shadowing and cloud cover, and to identify the imagery which best represented the end-of-summer, minimal snow cover extent on each glacier.

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