Monitoring the seasonal snow in mountain regions using Sentinel-2
Abstract
The Sentinel-2 mission was primarily designed for operational land use mapping and vegetation monitoring. However, the mission also offers the opportunity to monitor the seasonal snow cover in mountain regions at unprecedented spatio-temporal scale given the following characteristics:
- high spatial resolution of 10 to 60 m - high revisit capacity of 5 days - global land surface coverage - multiple spectral bands from the visible to the shortwave-infrared compatible with Landsat - high quality measurements in terms of radiometry and geometry - open data policy - long-term mission continuity supported by the European union commission Sentinel-2-retrievals have sufficient spatial resolution to characterize the high spatial variability of the snow properties in complex terrain and yet are scalable over entire mountain ranges. The high revisit capacity of 5 days increases the probability to capture cloud-free images. The high dynamic range of Sentinel-2 images allows reducing the saturation in south facing slopes and increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in shadowed slopes. As examples we will show how Sentinel-2 data can be used (i) to compute the duration of the snow cover over entire mountain ranges in combination with Landsat-8 data (ii) to estimate the dust content on the snow surface and its spatio-temporal variability at the scale of individual hill-slopes after significant dust-on-snow deposition events.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.C11B..02G
- Keywords:
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- 0740 Snowmelt;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0758 Remote sensing;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0772 Distribution;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 1863 Snow and ice;
- HYDROLOGY