Evaluating global snow water equivalent products for testing land surface models

Correlation and Prediction of Snow Water Equivalent from Snow Sensors

Since 1982, under an agreement between the California Department of Water Resources and the USDA Forest Service, snow sensors have been installed and operated in Forest Service-administered wilderness areas in the Sierra Nevada of California. The sensors are to be removed by 2005 because of the premise that sufficient data will have been collected to allow "correlation" and, by implication, pre...

Snow water equivalent estimation using blackbox optimization

Accurate measurements of snow water equivalent (SWE) is an important factor in managing water resources for hydroelectric power generation. SWE over a catchment area may be estimated via kriging on measures obtained by snow monitoring devices positioned at strategic locations. The question studied in this paper is to find the device locations that minimize the kriging interpolation error of the...

An Improved Land Surface Emissivity Parameter for Land Surface Models Using Global Remote Sensing Observations

Because land surface emissivity ( ) has not been reliably measured, global climate model (GCM) land surface schemes conventionally set this parameter as simply constant, for example, 1 as in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) model, and 0.96 for bare soil as in the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Commun...

GEO387H – Literature Review: Land surface Models and Surface Water Hydrology

Hemispheric-scale comparison of monthly passive microwave snow water equivalent products

The snow water equivalent (SWE) products from passive microwave remote sensing are useful in global climate change studies due to the long-time and all-weather imaging capabilities of passive microwave radiometry at the hemisphere scale. Northern Hemisphere SWE products, including products from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and GlobSnow from the European Space Agency (ESA), have...