How does snow’s anisotropic directional reflectance affect the mapping of snow properties from imaging spectrometer data? This sensitivity study applies two spectroscopy models to synthetic images of the spectral hemispherical–directional reflectance factor (HDRF) with prescribed snow-covered area and snow grain size. The MEMSCAG model determines both sub-pixel snow-covered area and the grain s...

Remote sensing methods to derive snow properties using both optical and SAR data are presented. The assimilation of the remote sensing products in the water balance and rainfall-runoff model LARSIM is demonstrated. The flood forecast centre in Karlsruhe applies LARSIM for the operational runoff forecast of the Neckar in the South West of Germany. A fully automatic algorithm to derive snow cover...

The runoff regime of high alpine basins will be affected in response to global warming not only by the seasonal snow cover but also by glaciers. Runoff peaks due to snowmelt will partially be shifted from the summer to the winter. The glacier melt will supply a higher amount of meltwater until glaciers finally disappear, if the temperature keeps rising. In order to evaluate quantitatively this ...

Significant areas of agricultural lands are subject to seasonal, relatively thin snow covers. This cover affects temperature and moisture in the soil beneath, watershed hydrology, and energy budgets. The depth of snow impacts soil freezing with implications for soil hydraulic properties and over-winter survival of certain crops. The objective of this study was to incorporate a sophisticated sno...

Sea ice is generally covered with snow, which can vary in thickness from a few centimeters to >1m. Snow cover acts as a thermal insulator modulating the heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere, and it impacts sea-ice growth rates and overall thickness, a key indicator of climate change in polar regions. Snow depth is required to estimate sea-ice thickness using freeboard measurements...

Snow cover is projected to decline during the next century in many ecosystems that currently experience a seasonal snowpack. Because snow insulates soils from frigid winter air temperatures, soils are expected to become colder and experience more winter soil freeze-thaw cycles as snow cover continues to decline. Tree roots are adversely affected by snowpack reduction, but whether loss of snow w...

The Snow and Ice Research Center (SIRC) of the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) of Japan has been developing a snow disaster forecasting system. This system consists of an atmospheric mesoscale model NHM, the numerical snow cover model SNOWPACK, and three diagnostic models of snow disasters. In this paper, the performance of NHM and SNOWPACK is invest...

We used snow fences and small (1m) open-topped fiberglass chambers (OTCs) to study the effects of changes in winter snow cover and summer air temperatures on arctic tundra. In 1994, two 60m long, 2.8m high snow fences, one in moist and the other in dry tundra, were erected at Toolik Lake, Alaska. OTCs paired with unwarmed plots, were placed along each experimental snow gradient and in control a...

RESUME It has been established that optical and near-infrared sensors can monitor the seasonal variations of snow cover in alpine areas in cloud free conditions. However, only microwave sensors are able to acquire data independently of day light and in adverse weather conditions. The effects of dry snow on currently available C-band SAR data are rather small and difficult to detect. On the cont...

One of the most visible and widely felt impacts of climate warming is the change (mostly loss) of low-elevation snow cover in the midlatitudes. Snow cover that accumulates at temperatures close to the ice-water phase transition is at greater risk to climate warming than cold climate snowpacks because it affects both precipitation phase and ablation rates. This study maps areas in the Pacific No...