Snow Water Equivalent

Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) is the amount of water contained within the snowpack. In other terms, it is the depth of water that would theoretically result from instantaneous snowpack melting.

SWE is correlated with snowpack depth and snow density. It is an important variable for different applications such as water stocks monitoring and flood events forecasting.

Snow Water Equivalent can be manually measured or estimated through non-contact devices from ground-level or space.

Unit: mm

Available products over Wales:

• Copernicus SSMIS/VIIRS Snow Cover Extent
• CMC Snow Cover Extent
• NASA/NSIDC AMSR-E/Aqua Global Snow Water Equivalent EASE-Grids
• NASA/NSIDC SSM/I & MODIS Blended Global EASE-Grids
• NASA/NEO SMMR & SSM/I
• ESA GlobSnow Reanalysis
• ESA Globsnow NRT