Abstract: This paper evaluates moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) shortwave land surface albedo products over multiple land cover types, especially the impact of snow on these data. We choose 19 sites from AmeriFLUX to validate MODIS shortwave albedo products in the year of 2005. These sites are covered by evergreen needleleaf forest, deciduous broadleaf forest, grassland, wetland, shrubland and cropland. For every vegetation type, the albedo inversion quality is worse with snow cover than snow free. Snow has the most impact on evergreen needleleaf forests than others. For this land cover type, the bias, root-mean-square error (RMSE) and standard deviation (STD) performances of albedo inversion increase from -0.002 3, 0.023 0, and 0.011 4 to 0.082 5, 0.108 5 and 0.086 6, respectively. For all data, the total bias, RMSE and STD increase from 0.020 6, 0.057 2 and 0.0539 to 0.035 5, 0.121 7 and 0.187 with effect of snow.