Employment of Satellite Snowcover Observations for Improving Seasonal Runoff Estimates

Low resolution meteorological satellite and high resolution earth resources satellite data have been used to map snowcovered area over the upper Indus River and the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, respectively. For the Indus River early Spring snowcovered area was extracted and related to April through June streamflow from 1967-1971 using a regression equation (r = 0.91). Prediction of the April-June 1972 streamflow from the satellite data was within three percent of the actual total. Composited results from two years of data over seven Wind River Mountain watersheds indicated that LANDSAT-1 snowcover observations, separated on the basis of watershed elevation, could also be related to runoff in significant regression equations. It appears that earth resources satellite data will be useful in assisting in the prediction of seasonal streamflow for various water resources applications, non hazardous collection of snow data from restricted-access areas, and in hydrologic modeling of snowmelt runoff.