Snow / Sea Ice Covered Area products (Ver.2) were released to the public on November 1, 2004. Current status of product validation and future plans are described below together with known problems of the current version.

There are some changes made for Ver.2 products as follows.

• Cloud detection for high altitude area (e.g. Ice sheet, mountainous region) is improved.
• Flag for snow cover over land is subdivided into two flags describing snow covers with and without vegetation (This change was done to eliminate the snow cover pixel contaminated with vegetation from the following analysis of snow physical parameters).

Current accuracy of the Ver.2 products (10%) are estimated based upon the analysis of GLI snow products around the both Polar Regions which are compared with AMSR and MODIS snow and ice cover extent products. The accuracy of this product is still preliminary and will be re-evaluated in coming version-up processes  of the GLI snow algorithms (Ver.3 in 2005 and later versions. See tentative future plan.). Known problems or concerns deteriorating the Ver.2 products' accuracy are the following;

• Sea ice area estimated tends to be slightly smaller than those of microwave sensor (AMSR).
• Nighttime data are not evaluated.