Fractional Snow Covered Area at Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard, Norway) 2015-2019

The produced dataset (in netCDF v4 format) contains the estimation of the Factional Snow Cover (FSC) in different sites located in Svalbard islands. We considered areas that complete the already available datasets and we focused the attention to the Ny-Ålesund area (Svalbard - Norway) (78.917° N, 11.933° E) where different facilities are available for supporting the use of terrestrial photography. One asset is the Zeppelin observatory, located on a panoramic spot where cameras are operating since 2000, and one is the Climate Change Tower (CCT) where we deployed a camera in 2018 (Figure 1). While the Zeppelin camera, operated by the Norwegian Polar Institute, offers a long time-series coupled with a pan-tilt-zoom device (4 different views daily), the CCT device was installed in order to cover the hidden side of the coastal plain not visible from the observatory. Furthermore, the CCT camera provided highly spatial and time resolved (hourly) images that were also below the cloud layer.