If you are interested in snow as well:
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.
