Environment and Disasters Monitoring Microsatellite Constellation with high spatial resolution,high temporal resolution and high spectral resolution characteristics was put forward by China.HJ-1B satellite,one of the first two small optical satellites,had a CCD camera and an infrared camera,which would provide an important new data source for snow monitoring.In the present paper,through analyzing the sensor and data characteristics of HJ-1B,we proposed a new infrared normalized difference snow index (INDSI) referring to the traditional normalized difference snow index (NDSI).The accuracy of these two automatic snow recognition methods was estimated based on a supervised classification method.The accuracy of the traditional NDSI method was 97.761 9％ while that of the new INDSI method was 98.617 1％.