Spatial and Temporal Variation of Bulk Snow Properties in North Boreal and Tundra Environments Based on Extensive Field Measurements

Abstract:

A large collection of in situ snow data was collected in a support of ESA SnowSAR airborne acquisitions in Northern Finland (Lemmetyinen et al., 2014). The purpose was to demonstrate the mission concept of the proposed ESA CoReH2O (Cold Regions Hydrology High-resolution Observatory, Rott et al., 2010) mission, a candidate in the ESA Earth Explorer series of Earth observing satellites. Around 21400 snow depth measurements, 600 SWE measurements and a number of distributed snow pit measurements were collected during 19 days between December 2011 and March 2012.

In this study, these field measurements will be used to analyse the snow property variation within and between different land-cover types in North boreal and tundra environments. The wide heterogeneity of snow properties forms a challenge for remote snow information retrieval as even in flat areas the amount and type of heterogeneity vary in a number of different scales. Especially, information of hemispheric scale SWE variation is suffering from large uncertainties, although, assimilation of ground-based and space-borne information and algorithms specific for a land-cover type have lowered these remaining uncertainties (Takala et al., 2011). This study aims to contribute to this future work for more reliable SWE retrievals by statistically describing the snow parameter variation in these northern environments.

Lemmetyinen, J., J. Pulliainen, A. Kontu, A. Wiesmann, C. Mätzler, H. Rott, K. Voglmeier, T. Nagler, A. Meta, A. Coccia, M. Schneebeli, M. Proksch, M. Davidson, D. Schüttemeyer, Chung-Chi Lin, and M. Kern, 2014. Observations of seasonal snow cover at X- and Ku bands during the NoSREx campaign. Proc. EUSAR 2014, 3–5 June 2014, Berlin.

Rott, H., S.H. Yueh, D.W. Cline, C. Duguay, R. Essery et al., 2010. Cold Regions Hydrology High-resolution Observatory for Snow and Cold Land Processes. Proc. IEEE, 98(5), 752–765.

Takala, M., K. Luojus, J. Pulliainen, C. Derksen, J. Lemmetyinen, J-P. Kärnä, J. Koskinen, and B. Bojkov, 2011. Estimating northern hemisphere snow water equivalent for climate research through assimilation of space-borne radiometer data and ground-based measurements. Remote Sens. Environ., 115(12), 3517–3529.