Crocus-ERA-Interim daily snow product over the Northern Hemisphere at 0.5° resolution

The Crocus-ERA-Interim daily snow product is derived from the complex snow scheme Crocus coupled to the ISBA (Interactions between Soil–Biosphere–Atmosphere) land surface model (Brun et al., 2013) and embedded into the SURFEX numerical platform (https://www.umr-cnrm.fr/surfex/). The model is driven by a meteorological forcing (temperature, precipitation, humidity, winds, etc) derived from the ERA-Interim global atmospheric reanalysis (https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-interim). This product only concerns open field snowpack, i.e. only low vegetation is modeled (no forest). It covers the entire Northern Hemisphere at 0.5° resolution over the 1979-07-01 to 2019-06-30 period. Snow depth and snow water equivalent (i.e. the snow mass) are available at a dailly frequency. The simulated snow depth, snow water equivalent, and density over open fields were validated against local observations from over 1000 monitoring sites in Northern Eurasian, available either once a day or three times per month (Brun et al., 2013). This product was used by the NOAA Artic Report Card from 2017 to 2020 for the annual survey of the Terrestrial Snow Cover anomalies over the Northern Hemisphere. This product was also used in several research studies (e.g. Mudryk et al., 2015; Mortimer et al., 2020; Kouki et al., 2023). The successor of this product based on ERA5 at 0.25° resolution over 1950 to 2023 can be found in Decharme (2024b).