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%.