A near-real time GMES-relevant monitoring system for semi-operational retrieval of snow covered area for hydrological and climatological applications has been developed in the Envisnow EC EESD FP 5 project. The system, using ENVISAT ASAR wide swath data from ESA AOE 785 and from the Kongsberg satellite station, geocodes and classifies Envisat ASAR data automatically, and produces SCA maps with ...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Fractional snow covered area Snow covered extent Downscaling Topography Hillslope scale Landsat NDSI Digital elevation models Snow remote sensing Watershed hydrology Accurate characterization of snow-covered area (SCA) and snow water equivalent (SWE) in complex terrain is needed to improve estimation of streamflow timing and volume, and is important for land surf...

Remote sensing of snow-covered area (SCA) can be binary (indicating the presence/absence of snow cover at each pixel) or fractional (indicating the fraction of each pixel covered by snow). Fractional SCA mapping provides more information than binary SCA, but is more difficult to implement and may not be feasible with all types of remote sensing data. The utility of fractional SCA mapping relati...

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 ...

Snow cover is a layer of snow on the earth’s surface, which is mainly results from snowfalls. The snow cover can be temporary, when a snow melts during several hours or days after its formation, and it can be stable, when it remains for the whole winter or with short interruptions. The snow cover formation on the globe is determined (conditioned) by the geographical zonality, surface relief, an...

With the high resolution of optical data and the lack of weather effects of passive microwave data, we developed an algorithm to map daily cloud-free fractional snow cover (FSC) based on the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) standard daily FSC product, the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR2) snow water equivalent (SWE) product and digital elevation data. We then u...

[1] A cloud-masked fractional snow-covered area (SCA) product gridded at 1 km was developed from the advanced very high resolution radiometer for the Colorado River and upper Rio Grande basins for 1995–2002. Cloud cover limited SCA retrievals on any given 1-km pixel to on average once per week. There were sufficient cloud-free scenes to map SCA over at least part of the basins up to 21 days per...

The MODIS daily snow albedo product is a data layer in the MOD10A1 snow-cover product that includes snow-covered area and fractional snow cover as well as quality information and other metadata (Riggs et al., 2006; Hall and Riggs, 2007). It was developed to augment the MODIS BRDF/Albedo algorithm (MCD43) that provides 16-day maps of albedo globally at 500-m resolution (Schaaf et al., 2002). But...

The overall idea behind the work presented is to combine the use of optical and SAR sensors and utilise the best features of each sensor when possible in order to map snow cover area (SCA) more frequently and with better spatial coverage than would otherwise be possible. Optical remote sensing sensors are able to map snow cover quite accurately, but are limited by clouds. SAR sensors penetrate ...

For the hydro power companies it is of major importance to know the magnitude of the spring flood. Hence, the amount of snow is crucial for forecast modelling. In mountainous areas with plenty of snow, the meteorological network is often sparse, and they lack direct observations of the snow pack. Therefore, if it is possible to combine satellite snow cover area information with a hydrologic mod...