The European-wide Mountain Tourism Meteorological and Snow Indicators (MTMSI) dataset : annual snow depth maxima

Abstract

The data set provides reanalysis of annual maxima of snow depth, from 1962 to 2015, at NUTS-3 scale (Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques, eur, 2015) by steps of 100 m elevation. It relates to the C3S Mountain Tourism Meteorological and Snow Indicators (MTMSI, Morin et al., 2021) data set, consisting of various meteorological and snow indicators at annual scale. 

Snow conditions are computed by the snow cover model Crocus, which takes meteorological forcings as inputs to simulate the state of the snowpack. The atmospheric reanalysis fields were extracted from the UERRA MESCAN-SURFEX (UERRA) reanalysis, which spans the time period from 1961 to 2015, at 5.5 km horizontal resolution (Soci et al., 2016), for selected grid points by NUTS-3 areas. In mountainous areas, the data is provided for several elevation steps of 100 m, while for non-mountainous areas the data is provided at the mean elevation of the NUTS-3 region. This data set was used as a reference for adjusting climate projections by Evin et al. (2025).

Technical details

File "max-sd-NS-year_UERRA.nc"
Under the variable 'max-sd-NS-year' of the netcdf file, the user can extract the annual snow depth maxima (in meter) at NUTS-3 scale, that have been calculated on the hydrological year from Y-1/08/02 to Y/08/01. If there was no snow during the hydrological year of one NUTS/elevation pair, snow depth maxima is set as NA. The extract has NUTS/elevation*year dimension.

File "MTMSI_lat_lon_zs.nc"
The metadata file contains values of latitude and longitude of the barycenter of the NUTS-3 associated with the annual maxima timeseries. The two files relate to each other as the i row from the annual maxima files is located at the i value of longitude, latitude and elevation from the metadata file.

File "nuts_details.zip"
The compressed shapefiles contain information about the NUTS-3 for which timeseries are available. 'nuts_id' attribute gives the identifier of each NUTS-3, 'nuts_name' gives its name, 'relief' provides the NUTS-3 type (either mountain called 'montagne', or plain called 'plaine'), finally 'alt_ideal' gives the mean elevation of the NUTS-3 rounded to the hundred.