Sustaining Himalayan Water Resources in a Changing Climate (SusHi-Wat): Monthly maps of wet and dry snow over a Himalayan river basin (January 2015 to July 2017)

This dataset contains monthly maps of dry and wet snow for a Himalayan river basin in northern India. The data were collected as part of the Sustaining Himalayan Water Resources in a Changing Climate (SusHi-Wat) project aimed at improving our understanding on how water is stored in, and moves through, a Himalayan river system in northern India. The maps were obtained by combining satellite remote sensing images from Sentinel-1 and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The resolution of the maps is 500m and the coordinate system is EPSG:4326. The dry snow data correspond to the MODIS land cover product (MCD12Q1). The wet snow data were obtained from Sentinel-1 by applying a -2dB threshold on the backscatter ratio between a Sentinel-1 image with wet snow and a reference Sentinel-1 image with only dry snow. The possible pixel values are: 0: no snow, 1-100: wet snow cover fraction, 101-200: dry snow cover fraction with an offset of 100, 240: missing Sentinel-1 data, 250: pixel wrongly identified as wet snow by Sentinel-1 (false positives), 255: fill value. The images are GeoTIFF formatted.