The display of natural scenes such as mountains, trees, the earth as viewed from space, the sea, and waves have been attempted. Here a method to realistically display snow is proposed. In order to achieve this, two important elements have to be considered, namely the shape and shading model of snow, based on the physical phenomenon. In this paper, a method for displaying snow fallen onto object...

Spatial distributions of snow in mountain environments represent the time integration of accumulation and ablation processes, and are strongly and dynamically linked to mountain hydrologic, ecologic, and climatic systems. Accurate measurement and modeling of the spatial distribution and variability of the seasonal mountain snowpack at different scales are imperative for water supply and hydropo...

A comprehensive hydroclimatic data set is presented for the 2011 water year to improve understanding of hydrologic processes in the rain–snow transition zone. This type of data set is extremely rare in scientific literature because of the quality and quantity of soil depth, soil texture, soil moisture, and soil temperature data. Standard meteorological and snow cover data for the entire 2011 wa...

Wind sometimes creates a hard, wind-packed layer at the surface of a snowpack. The formation of such wind crusts was observed during wind tunnel experiments with combined SnowMicroPen and Microsoft Kinect sensors. The former provides the hardness of new and wind-packed snow and the latter spatial snow depth data in the test section. Previous experiments had shown that saltation is necessary but...

[1] The sensitivity of passive microwave satellite observations to snow characteristics is evaluated, between 19 and 85 GHz, for a winter season, for the Northern Hemisphere. The surface emissivities derived from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager measurements are systematically compared with in situ snow measurements at 2784 stations, in North America and Eurasia. In addition, coincident sate...

The Arctic is melting at an unprecedented rate and key drivers are changes in snow and ice albedo. Here we show that red snow, a common algal habitat blooming after the onset of melting, plays a crucial role in decreasing albedo. Our data reveal that red pigmented snow algae are cosmopolitan as well as independent of location-specific geochemical and mineralogical factors. The patterns for snow...

The snow cover in lower mountain areas is often a very dynamic matter. For flood forecast, but also for continuous water balance modelling, a detailed knowledge of the snow cover, its temporal dynamics and current snow properties is essential. According to this, modelling of the snow cover is a constituent part of applied water balance models. To drive and calibrate the models, spatial measurem...

Most snow mold pathogens cause plant injury only under prolonged snow cover, so snow mold diseases are severe primarily in regions where snow cover persists for more than 100 days. Even within these regions, disease occurrence and severity varies greatly from year to year. When disease is severe, individual fungal colonies coalesce, resulting in substantial losses in plant stand (20). In other ...

Since March 2002, the GRACE mission provides monthly global maps of geoid time-variations. These new data carry information on the continental water storage, including snow mass variations, with a ground resolution of ~600-700 km. We have computed monthly snow mass solutions from the inversion of the 22 GRACE geoids (04/2002-05/2004). The inverse approach developed here allows to separate the s...

a r t i c l e i n f o Snow is among the most " colorful " materials in nature, but most of the variability in snow reflectance occurs beyond 0.8 µm rather than in the visible spectrum. In these wavelengths, reflectance decreases dramatically as the snow grains evolve and grow, whereas in the visible spectrum snow reflectance is degraded by contaminants such as dust, algae, and soot. From imagin...