Uncertainty in satellite remote sensing of snow fraction for water resources management

Snow fraction is an important component of land surface models and hydrologic models. Information on snow fraction also improves downstream products retrieved from remote sensing: vertical atmosphere profiles, soil moisture, heat fluxes, etc. The uncertainty of the fractional snow cover estimates must be determined, quantified, and reported to consider the suitability of the product for modeling, data assimilation and other applications. The reflectances of snow and non-snow are characterized by a very significant local variability and also by changes from one scene to another. The local snow and non-snow endmembers are approximated by the Normalized Difference Snow Index with a high accuracy. The magnitudes of snow and non-snow Normalized Difference Snow Indexes are scene-specific and calculated on the fly to retrieve snow fraction. The development of the Normalized Difference Snow Index based algorithms to estimate snow fraction including a scene-specific approach taking local snow and non-snow properties into account is considered an optimal way to fractional snow retrieval from moderate resolution optical remote sensing observations. The Landsat reference data are used to estimate the performance of the fractional snow cover algorithms at moderate resolution and to compare the quality of alternative algorithms. The validation results demonstrate that the performance of the algorithms using Normalized Difference Snow Index has advantages. The advantages achieved in snow fraction retrieval lead to improved estimate of snow water equivalent and changes in snow cover state contributing to better modeling of land surface and hydrologic regime. The success of managing water resources on the whole depends on coordinating described investigations with the works of other researchers developing further enhanced models.