For more information, go to: https://www.igarss2018.org/

Snow session:

"Seasonal Snow Ground-Based Remote Sensing"

Chairs: Ludovic Brucker and Juha Lemmetyinen

Session abstract:

Seasonal snow cover plays a key role in freshwater resources, water 

security, natural hazards, and weather and climate. Accurate estimation 

of snow-water equivalent (SWE) with remote sensing observations remains 

a significant challenge. Several space agencies strongly support 

experiments on seasonal snow ground-based remote sensing to develop 

satellite concepts. Therefore, in recent years, multiple campaigns have 

been carried out and several sites have been instrumented to operate 

ground-based and tower-mounted remote sensing instruments for monitoring 

snow cover and for use in assessing the accuracy of remotely-sensed 

data. After years of efforts starting with NASA’s Cold Land Processes 

Experiment (CLPX), and under ESA’s CoReH20 project, both designed to 

improve our monitoring capabilities of SWE with campaigns in the western 

U.S., the Alps and northern Europe, the first year of NASA’s SnowEx 

project enabled the coordinated collection of in situ, ground-based and 

airborne remote sensing observations in Colorado. Tower-mounted and 

mobile active and passive microwave instruments (radar, scatterometer, 

radiometer), lidar, spectrometers, and novel remote sensing techniques 

were deployed over the same areas. This session invites presentations 

that address snow ground-based remote sensing activities from: SnowEx, 

Nordic Snow Radar Experiment, and other snow campaigns, present 

winter-long time series, spatially extensive measurements, and finally 

novel remote sensing instruments for snow monitoring in a variety of 

sites in different snow types, topography and vegetation. While SnowEx 

brought together more than 30 instruments, in this session the intent is 

to bring together people who collected snow remote sensing observations 

during campaigns operating in different snow, topography, and vegetation 

conditions. Moreover, since our understanding of remote sensing 

observations requires knowledge of both the snow micro-structure 

properties and strongly relies on the availability of state-of-the-art 

snow radiative transfer models, presentations on these topics 

intertwined with recent observations are welcome.