For this course, I've decided to focus on the 45 year data set of marine survivals for Little Port Walter Chinook salmon. It is hypothesized that the first few weeks in the ocean is a “critical period” for juvenile salmon that may ultimately regulate the abundance of returning adult fish from the cohort in later years. So, I’m curious to explore if overall marine survival for LPW Chinook is correlated with various ocean variables (SST, chlorophyll a and/or primary productivity) measured during their first 1-3 months at sea. For now I'll focus on the months of May/June since we release the juvenile Chinook on May 15 of every year. The fish are released at age 2, so this lag must be accounted for during analysis. Here are the data sets that I'm considering:

1) ESA CCI Ocean Colour Product (CCI ALL-v5.0-Monthly), 0.0416666°, 1997-present; Dataset ID: pmlEsaCCI50OceanColorMonthly.  This data set doesn't span the entire time series of marine survival, but I think chlorophyll a may be pretty interesting to explore.  

2) SST and SST Anomaly, Daily Optimum Interpolation (OI), AVHRR Only, Version 2.1, Final, Global, 0.25°, 1981-present; Dataset ID: ncdcOisst21Agg.  I'm not exactly sure how I'd like to summarize the daily measurements, most likely look for weekly or monthly averages. 

3) Primary Productivity, Aqua MODIS, NPP, Global, 2003-present, Experimental (8 day composite); Dataset ID: erdMH1pp8day. Lots of missing data for southeast Alaska so I'll probably skip this one for now. 

I checked with my contact at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and below is some info on snow data that you may find of interest.

For snow depth:

Canadian Meteorological Center (CMC) Daily Snow Depth Analysis Data https://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0447

This contains snow depth and SWE values. It only goes back to 1998 but it has a high temporal resolution of 1 day and a spatial resolution of 24 x 24 km (which might be too coarse for their purposes). The data are available in ASCII or GeoTIFF format.

SNODAS https://nsidc.org/data/g02158

This has the advantage that it has a high spatial resolution (1 x 1 km), but it only goes back to 2003 and it is model output rather than direct observations. This is meant to support hydrological modeling and analysis, so could be a good one for their project.

For snow cover:

Northern Hemisphere EASE-Grid 2.0 Weekly Snow Cover and Sea Ice Extent https://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0046

This goes back to 1966 and has a resolution of 25x25km, the sticking point might be that the data are in binary format

There are a lot of MODIS products for snow cover, they go back to the year 2000. A couple that might be worth looking at are:

MODIS/Terra Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m SIN Grid https://nsidc.org/data/MOD10A1/

MODIS/Aqua Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500m SIN Grid https://nsidc.org/data/myd10a1

This data set may also be of interest for their project:

Timing and Statistics of Autumn and Spring Annual Snow Cover for the Northern Hemisphere, 1972 to 2000, Version 1
https://nsidc.org/data/G02168/versions/1

This external website is also always a good one to check out if you are interested in snow cover:

https://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/

And it may be worth them asking their local national weather service office, to see if they have any recommendations for local data they could use?

And of course if the user wants to reach out directly to us at nsidc@nsidc.org with further questions then please let them know they are welcome to do so.