Boreal species sensitive to the timing and duration of snow cover are particularly vulnerable to global climate change. Recent work has shown a link between wolverine (Gulo gulo) habitat and persistent spring snow cover through 15 May, the approximate end of the wolverine’s reproductive denning period. We modeled the distribution of snow cover within the Columbia, Upper Missouri, and Upper Colo...

A continuously running hydrological energy balance model was used to analyse the influence of different snow covers on the formation of large floods within glacierized catchments. Model outputs from three different catchments in the Austrian Alps with glacierizations ranging from 30 to 39 % were statistically interpreted to cover a wide range of possible combinations of areal snow cover distrib...

Snow cover in the Tibetan Plateau is highly variable in space and time and plays a key role in ecological processes of this cold-desert ecosystem. Resolution of passive microwave data is too low for regional-scale estimates of snow cover on the Tibetan Plateau, requiring an alternate data source. Optically derived snow indices allow for more accurate quantification of snow cover using higherres...

The purpose of this report is to provide a review of optical snow cover algorithms to assist algorithm selection in the CryoRisk project. The first part of the report provides a brief review of the state of the art for snow cover retrieval algorithms developed internationally. The review covers classification algorithms (snow/non-snow algorithms), fractional snow cover algorithms (snow fraction...

Changes in the snow cover extent are both a cause and a consequence of climate change. Optical remote sensing with heliosynchronous satellites currently provides snow cover data at high spatial resolution with daily revisiting time. However, high latitude image acquisition is limited because reflective sensors of many satellites are switched off at high solar zenith angles (SZA) due to lower si...

1. introduction glaciers and snow covers in the mountains play an important role in the water budget of many areas of the world (ramage and isacks, 2003). in high altitudes and mountainous regions, snowmelt is a great contributor to the yearly runoff. the snow melt supplies 1/6 of people's needed water but due to global warming these glaciers may be at risk (barnett, et al. 2005). for the regio...

Abstract An analysis of snow cover measurement data in a number of physiographic regions and landscapes has shown that fields of snow cover characteristics exhibit statistical self-similarity property. This property is useful when, because of a sparse measurement network, the spatial variability of snow cover can be determined only for large enough basins. Small-scale variability of snow cover ...

The presence of snow cover has significant impacts on the both global and regional climate and water balance on earth. The accurate estimation of snow cover area can be used for forecasting runoff due to snow melt and output of hydroelectric power. With development of remote sensing techniques at different scopes in earth science, enormous algorithms for retrieval hydrometeor parameters have be...

The change in snow cover under climate change is poorly understood in Tianshan Mountains. Here, we investigate the spatiotemporal characteristics and trends of snow-covered area (SCA) and snow-covered days (SCD) in the Tianshan Mountains by using the cloud-removed MODIS fractional snow cover datasets from 2001–2015. The possible linkage between the snow cover and temperature and precipitation c...

This paper reports on the radiometric calibration and the use of calibrated intensity data in applications related to snow cover monitoring with a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS). An application of the calibration method to seasonal snow cover change detection is investigated. The snow intensity from TLS data was studied in Sodankylä, Finland during the years 2008-2009 and in Kirkkonummi, Finla...