Snow cover is often measured as snow water equivalent (SWE), which refers to the amount of water stored in a snow-pack that would be available upon melting. Snow cover and SWE represent the source of local snow melt release, and are sensitive to regional and global atmospheric circulation, and changes in climate. Monitoring SWE using satellite-based passive microwave radiometry has provided nea...

Detection and determination of ice and snow characteristics using remote sensing data is a new method in obtaining hydrology parameters. In order to determine these characteristics the numbers of meteorological stations are not enough in the glacier and mountain regions. We suggest using remotely sensing data for removing these deficiencies. Snow is distinguished more than other objects in the ...

Remote sensing offers local, regional and global observations of seasonal snow, providing key information on snowpack processes. This brief review highlights advancements in instrumentation and analysis techniques that have been developed over the past decade. Areas of advancement include improved algorithms for mapping snow-cover extent, snow albedo, snow grain size, snow water equivalent, mel...

[1] Snow cover strongly interacts with climate through snow albedo feedbacks. However, global climate models still are not adequate in representing snow cover fraction (SCF), i.e., the fraction of a model grid cell covered by snow. Through an analysis of the advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) derived SCF and the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) gridded snow depth and snow wate...

A distributed land-surface model is used to simulate the seasonal cycle of snow cover for a high-latitude basin. In comparison with the distributed model, a simulation using surface parameters and meteorological data averaged over the entire basin overestimates the peak snow accumulation and underestimates the duration of snow cover. Dividing the basin into a small number of elevation bands and...

The spatial distribution of the mountain snow cover is of high importance for many issues in hydrology (e.g. water supply, flooding), natural hazards (e.g. snow avalanches) or mountain ecology. The snow distribution is typically characterised by a strong spatial heterogeneity, that is the result of different processes interacting with the local topography. Characterising this spatial heterogene...

MODIS, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), is scheduled for launch in late 1998 or 1999 aboard the first Earth Observing System (EOS) platform. Global, daily snow-cover maps with a spatial resolution of 500 meters will be produced from MODIS data using a fully-automated and computationally-frugal snow-mapping algorithm. Recently, modifications to the original snow-mapping...

We investigated utilization of Japanese geostationary meteorological satellite, Multi-functional Transport Satellite (MTSAT) data which is able to provide hourly image to a terrestrial monitoring. Firstly, SZA angular effect in reflectance channel was corrected, then algorithms for daily composite were compared. Hourly measurement of MTSAT increased the chance of observing cloud-free land surfa...