Seasonal snow cover is a key component of the Earth’s energy balance and a key storage mechanism for water. In many areas of the world, people rely on snowmelt runoff for their water resources. For example, melting snow contributes upwards of 70% of the total annual water supply in the western U.S., and in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal snow and ice melt from the Hindu Kush and Himalay...

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...

In cold-limited arctic environments, the duration and timing of the snow cover and the vegetation green season have major ecological implications. I monitored the phenology of snow cover and greenness using MODIS Terra satellite data for the years 2000 to 2016 in the 5 National Parks of northern Alaska, USA. Mann-Kendall trend tests showed that the end of the continuous snow season and midpoint...

[1] The Greenland ice sheet has been the focus of much attention recently because of increasing melt in response to regional climate warming and can be studied using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT) data. To improve our ability to measure surface melt, we use remote sensing data products to study surface and near-surface melt characteristi...

estimating snow melt water equivalent is one of the most important challenges in determining the hydrological regime in mountainous basins. there are some problematic obstacles in field observations, due to inaccessibility as well due to difficulties in snow sampling at snow covered peaks making researchers try to find indirect approaches. one of these methods in use is degree- day model that i...

Monitoring surface albedo at medium-to-fine resolution (<100 m) has become increasingly important for medium-to-fine scale applications and coarse-resolution data evaluation. This paper presents a method for estimating surface albedo directly using top-of-atmosphere reflectance. This is the first attempt to derive surface albedo for both snow-free and snow-covered conditions from medium-resolut...

Original scientific paper Determining snowmelt runoff share of watershed basins with snow and wet snow regimes is one of the main concerns of the experts in water resources field, assessment of which has been done so far with difficulties and high rate of error due to lack of snow survey and weather stations in highlands of basin and use of traditional surveying methods. Lack of integrated mana...