Quantifying and attributing the phenological changes in snow cover are essential for meteorological, hydrological, ecological, and societal implications. However, snow cover phenology changes have not been well documented. Evidence from multiple satellite and reanalysis data from 2001 to 2014 points out that the snow end date (De) advanced by 5.11 (±2.20) days in northern high latitudes (52-75°...

BACKGROUND Long-term studies allow capture of a wide breadth of environmental variability and a broader context within which to maximize our understanding of relationships to specific aspects of wildlife behavior. The goal of our study was to improve our understanding of the biological value of dense conifer cover to deer on winter range relative to snow depth and ambient temperature. METHODO...

Information on snow cover and snow properties is an important factor for hydrology and runoff modeling. Frequent updates of snow cover information can help to improve water balance and discharge calculations. Within the frame of Polar View, snow products from multisensoral satellite data are operationally provided to control and update water balance models for large parts of Southern Germany. T...

The objective of this work is to evaluate the use of the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) data for seasonal snow cover monitoring specifically in the boreal forest belt. For this purpose, we tuned an existing method for fractional snow cover mapping in order to produce snow maps from MERIS imagery. The method was originally developed at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), wh...

Future climate will alter the soil cover of mosses and snow depths in the boreal forests of eastern Canada. In field manipulation experiments, we assessed the effects of varying moss and snow depths on the physiology of black spruce (Picea -mariana (Mill.) B.S.P.) and trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) in the boreal black spruce forest of western Québec. For 1 year, naturally regenera...

We developed an automated approach for mapping persistent ice and snow cover (glaciers and perennial snowfields) from Landsat TM and ETM+ data across a variety of topography, glacier types, and climatic conditions at high latitudes (above ~65 ̋N). Our approach exploits all available Landsat scenes acquired during the late summer (1 August–15 September) over a multi-year period and employs an aut...

geographic information and analysis provide a wide range of data and techniques to monitor and manage natural resources. as an important case, in arid and semi-arid areas, water management is critical for both local governance and citizens. as a result, the estimation of water potential brought by snowmelt runoff and rainfalls seems to be very useful and important for these areas. hydrological ...

1 Throughout much of the latter half of the 20th century, the dominant mode of North2 ern Hemisphere (NH) extratropical wintertime circulation variability−the Arctic Oscillation 3 (AO)−exhibited a positive trend, with decreasing high-latitude sea-level pressure (SLP) and 4 increasing mid-latitude SLP. General circulation models (GCMs) show this trend is related 5 to several factors, including N...

In many instances, snow cover and duration are a major controlling factor on a range of environmental systems in mountain regions. When assessing the impacts of climatic change on mountain ecosystems and river basins whose origin lie in the Alps, one of the key controls on such systems will reside in changes in snow amount and duration. At present, regional climate models or statistical downsca...

The Himalayas are presently holding the largest ice masses outside the polar regions and thus (temporarily) store important freshwater resources. In contrast to the contemplation of glaciers, the role of runoff from snow cover has received comparably little attention in the past, although (i) its contribution is thought to be at least equally or even more important than that of ice melt in many...