Active microwave remote sensing is one of the important methods to monitor snow cover and retrieve snow parameters such as snow water equivalent (SWE), snow particle size and snow density. SWE provides useful information for hydrological, climatic and meteorological applications. Retrieving SWE from active microwave remote sensing data has attracted widespread attention in the academic community. This paper took Nongan County, Jilin Province, China as the study area, and selected two scenes of Sentinel-1 interference wide-mode (IW) SAR images to retrieve the SWE in the shallow dry snow area in winter. A mathematical expression that defines the relationship between the backscattering coefficient ratio and the thermal resistance calculated from the measured snow data was established. By using the relationship between the measured thermal resistance and the measured SWE, the value of SWE in the study area can be retrieved by the backscattering coefficient ratio. The result shows that the method used in this paper has high precision (MAE=0.198cm, RMSE=0.24cm). It is feasible to use the C-band Sentinel-1 SAR data to retrieve SWE.

Date Published: 9 September 2019
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 11127, Earth Observing Systems XXIV, 1112724 (9 September 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2527383

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 11127:
Earth Observing Systems XXIV
James J. Butler; Xiaoxiong (Jack) Xiong; Xingfa Gu, Editor(s)