A suite of Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) snow products at various spatial and temporal resolutions from the Terra satellite has been available since February 2000. Standard products include daily and 8-day composite 500 m resolution swath and tile products (which include fractional snow cover (FSC) and snow albedo), and 0Ð05° resolution products on a climate-modelling gr...

but snow cover will decrease. In this paper, we examine potential effects of a reduction in snow cover on northWe measured deciduous forest soil temperatures under control (unmanipulated) and snow-free (where snow is manually removed) eastern forests by examining soil temperatures under conditions for four winters (at three soil depths) to determine effects control and snow-free (where snow is ...

The effects of climate change on biodiversity have emerged as a dominant theme in conservation biology, possibly eclipsing concern over habitat loss in recent years. The extent to which this shifting focus has tracked the most eminent threats to biodiversity is not well documented. We investigated the mechanisms driving shifts in the southern range boundary of a forest and snow cover specialist...

In scattering modeling of the snow cover individual snow particles are often assumed to be spherical and, depending on the frequency range, either Rayleigh approximation or Mie-scattering is used for the calculation of the phase matrix. However, the complex shapes of realistic snow crystals can have a significant effect on the scattering properties at higher frequencies, especially for the cros...

Central Asia consists of the five former Soviet States Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, therefore comprising an area of ~4 Mio km2. The continental climate is characterized by hot and dry summer months and cold winter seasons with most precipitation occurring as snowfall. Accordingly, freshwater supply is strongly depending on the amount of accumulated snow as w...

For many cases modeled and measured UV global irradiances agree to within +/-5% for cloudless conditions, provided that all relevant parameters for describing the atmosphere and the surface are well known. However, for conditions with snow-covered surfaces this agreement is usually not achievable, because on the one hand the regional albedo, which has to be used in a model, is only rarely avail...

Blowing snow and snow drifts are common features in the Arctic. Due to sparse vegetation, low temperatures and high wind speeds, the snow is constantly moving. This causes severe problems for transportation and infrastructure in the affected areas. To minimise the effect of drifting snow already in the designing phase of new structures, adequate models have to be developed and tested. In this s...

A fully automated method uses Landsat Thematic Mapper data to map snow cover in the Sierra Nevada and make quantitative estimates of the fractional snow-covered area within each pixel. We model winter and spring reference scenes as linear mixtures of image end member spectra to produce the response variables for tree-based regression and classification models. Decision trees identify cloud cove...

We analyse spatial variability and different evolution patterns of snowpack in a mixed beech–fir stand in the central Pyrenees. Snow depth and density were surveyed weekly along six transects of contrasting forest cover during a complete accumulation and melting season; we also surveyed a sector unaffected by canopy cover. Forest density was measured using the sky view factor (SVF) obtained fro...

Actual and insolation-weighted Northern Hemisphere snow cover and sea ice are binned by latitude bands for the years 1973–2002. Antarctic sea-ice is also analyzed for the years 1980–2002. The use of insolation weighting provides an improved estimate of the radiative feedbacks of snow cover and sea-ice into the atmosphere. One conclusion of our assessment is that while a decrease in both areal a...