Norsk Regnesentral (Norwegian Computing Center, NR) is a private, independent, non-profit foundation established in 1952. NR carries out contract research and development projects in the areas of information and communication technology, applied statistical modelling and earth observation.

NR has been a leading research and development institute in satellite remote sensing since Norway started to focus on this discipline in the beginning of the 1980's. The institute's main role has since then been to carry out research and development of methodology for analysis of digital remote sensing data, in particular for semi-automatic and automatic classification, parameter retrieval and object recognition.

NR has a long record in retrieval of geophysical variables in the cryosphere, in particular for snow variables. Currently, NR is developing new methods for optical as well as multi-sensor time-series algorithms for retrieval of snow variables, such as snow cover area, snow surface temperature, snow wetness, snowmelt onset, snow grain size and snow surface albedo.