This paper presents a study to demonstrate the potential of a spaceborne u-band scatterometer to monitor global snow cover. Global u-band data were acquired by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Scatterometer (NSCAT) operated on the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS) from September 1996 to June 1997. NSCAT backscatter patterns over the northern hemisphere reveals b...

The classification of snow profiles is traditionally based on the discrete interpretation of snow layers in a snow pack. The layers are discriminated according to the physical properties of the snow. To account for the micro-mechanical behaviour of snow in deformation, the classification needs to be extended to the micro-structure of snow. A new instrument, the high-resolution snow penetrometer...

Levels of neutral poly-/perfluoroalkyl substances (nPFASs) in air and snow collected from Ny-Ålesund were measured and their air-snow exchange was determined to investigate whether they could re-volatilize into the atmosphere driven by means of air-snow exchange. The total concentration of 12 neutral PFASs ranged from 6.7 to 39 pg m(-3) in air and from 330 to 690 pg L(-1) in snow. A significant...

The distribution of forest cover exerts strong controls on the spatiotemporal distribution of snow accumulation and snowmelt. The physical processes that govern these controls are poorly understood given a lack of detailed measurements of snow states. In this study, we address one of many measurement gaps by using contact spectroscopy to measure snow optical grain size at high spatial resolutio...

Recent work on the quantization of Maxwell theory has used a non-covariant class of gauge-averaging functionals which include explicitly the effects of the extrinsic-curvature tensor of the boundary, or covariant gauges which, unlike the Lorentz case, are invariant under conformal rescalings of the background four-metric. This paper studies in detail the admissibility of such gauges at the clas...

Snow cover depletion curves are required for several water management applications of snow hydrology and are often difficult to obtain automatically using optical remote sensing data owing to both frequent cloud cover and temporary snow cover. This study develops a methodology to produce accurate snow cover depletion curves automatically using high temporal resolution optical remote sensing dat...