Evaluation of Northern Hemisphere Snow Extent products within ESA SnowPEx-project

Results from the ESA SnowPEx project concerning the evaluation of the Earth Observation-based snow products is presented, the focus being on the Northern Hemisphere (NH) Snow Extent (SE) daily products by different data providers. Comparison against daily at-ground observed Snow Depth is made, after first converting all the snow products and the in-situ observations to binary `snow/no-snow' information. We first introduce the datasets employed in the analyses, then describe the applied methodology and finally present the major findings obtained so far. The results presented here do not cover all the investigations carried out within SnowPEx and thus can be considered as an overview of preliminary results of the validation with in-situ data which will be complemented later when the comprehensive analysis of the results is completed.