[1] Snow cover strongly interacts with climate through snow albedo feedbacks. However, global climate models still are not adequate in representing snow cover fraction (SCF), i.e., the fraction of a model grid cell covered by snow. Through an analysis of the advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) derived SCF and the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) gridded snow depth and snow wate...

The presence of snow cover has significant impacts on the both global and regional climate and water balance on earth. The accurate estimation of snow cover area can be used for forecasting runoff due to snow melt and output of hydroelectric power. With development of remote sensing techniques at different scopes in earth science, enormous algorithms for retrieval hydrometeor parameters have be...

Snow sublimation is an important hydrological process and one of the main causes of the temporal and spatial variation of snow distribution. Compared with surface sublimation, drifting snow sublimation is more effective due to the greater surface exposure area of snow particles in the air. Previous studies of drifting snow sublimation have focused on suspended snow, and few have considered salt...

[1] It has been a long-standing puzzle why clouds, which should interact with solar radiation similarly to a thin layer of snow, have such a dramatic effect on the reflectance observed by satellites over snow-covered regions. The presence of a cloud over the snow strongly enhances the anisotropy of the scene, so that a cloud-over-snow scene appears darker than clear sky over snow when observed ...

Spatial population models predict strong density-dependence and relatively stable population dynamics near the core of a species' distribution with increasing variance and importance of density-independent processes operating towards the population periphery. Using a 10-year data set and an information-theoretic approach, we tested a series of candidate models considering density-dependent and ...

The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is one of the most widely used fish species in aquaculture and physiological research. In the present paper, we report the first cloning, 3D (three-dimensional) modelling, pharmacological characterization and tissue distribution of two melanocortin (MC) receptors in rainbow trout. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that these receptors are orthologues of the...

Among the many threats posed by invasions of nonnative species is introgressive hybridization, which can lead to the genomic extinction of native taxa. This phenomenon is regarded as common and perhaps inevitable among native cutthroat trout and introduced rainbow trout in western North America, despite that these taxa naturally co-occur in some locations. We conducted a synthetic analysis of 1...

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, snow interacts strongly with the global climate system, both influencing and forming as a result of this system. The following chapters discuss the interaction of snow with the chemical and biological systems. This chapter discusses the physical properties of snow as the habitat and regulator of the snow ecosystem. In this sense, the physical snow cover ...

Background: In this article, it was analyzed how snow melting affects the assembly of lichen and moss communities in a small area of the coastal region of Barton Peninsula, which is in maritime Antarctic. In the small area, even though there is a huge gap of difference of the environment between the snow-filled area and snow-melt one, the latter did not have distinctive environmental gradients....

The microwave interferometric radiometer of the European Space Agency’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission measures at a frequency of 1.4 GHz in the L-band. In contrast to other microwave satellites, low frequency measurements in L-band have a large penetration depth in sea ice and thus contain information on the ice thickness. Previous ice thickness retrievals have neglected a sno...