An Assessment and Error Analysis of MOD10A1 Snow Product Using Landsat and Ground Observations Over China During 2000–2016

The MOD10A1 daily snow cover product offers a fine temporal resolution, which is particularly important for time-critical applications. Although the reliability of this product was mostly verified by ground measurements before use, the inadequate representativeness of point-scale observations may lead to errors in the assessment of MOD10A1. In this study, based on the Google Earth Engine, MOD10A1 was thoroughly evaluated by a total of 20 131 binary snow maps generated from 30 m Landsat imagery for the 2000–2016 snow seasons in three typical snow regions across China. The three typical snow regions included Northern Xinjiang, Northeast China, and the Tibetan Plateau. In general, the accuracy of MOD10A1 under clear sky conditions is 86.5% based on ground observations from meteorological stations and 90.3% based on Landsat imagery. Compared with ground measurements, snow cover derived from Landsat images is in better agreement with MOD10A1 due to a better spatial match. The error analyses also indicate that 1) compared with land cover, topography has larger effects on the accuracy of MOD10A1 over the three snow regions with statistically significant negative relationships, particularly in Northern Xinjiang (
R
= −0.604,
P
< 0.05); and 2) MOD10A1 shows a relatively lower accuracy of 81.8% from 2006 to 2008 due to the decrease in snow depth during this period (
R
= 0.58,
P
< 0.05) based on the Mann–Kendall test.