This data set provides the location and extent of surface water (open water not including vegetated wetlands) for the entire Boreal and Tundra regions of North America for three epochs, centered on 1991, 2001, and 2011. Each of the products were generated with at least three years of ice-free Landsat imagery. The data are at 30-m resolution and were derived from time series of Landsat 4 and 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) data and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) covering all of Alaska and all provinces of Canada. The overall goal was to generate a map of the nominal extent of water for a given epoch, where nominal is neither the maximum nor the minimum but rather a representative extent for that time period.