Retrieving snow cover information from AMSR-2 satellite data for North-West Himalaya, India

Abstract

Assessment of seasonal snowpack play an important role in hydrology, climatology and disaster related studies particularly snow avalanche. In the present study, snow cover information, i.e. Snow Cover Area (SCA) and Snow Depth (SD) has been retrieved over North West Himalaya using Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-2) satellite data for period 2012–2016. The spatio-temporal variations of AMSR-2 retrieved Brightness Temperature (T_B) and Scattering Index (SI) values were used to obtain SCA. The SCA retrieved using AMSR-2 was compared with MODIS retrieved SCA and a good agreement has been observed. A SD algorithm was developed for a part of Great Himalaya based on the field measured SD and satellite retrieved T_B. The satellite retrieved SD values were found in agreement with field measured SD (R² = 0.8). The The RMSE and MAE were found as ∼16 and ∼13.9 cm, respectively. This study is important for retrieving snow cover information on regular basis from Himalaya.

Keywords:

• AMSR-2
• North West Himalaya
• brightness temperature
• snow depth

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Director, Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment (SASE), Chandigarh for support to this work. The authors would like to acknowledge SASE technical persons for collecting ground data. The authors would like to thank Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for providing AMSR-2 data and to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for providing MODIS data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.