ALGORITHM FOR SNOW MONITORING USING REMOTE SENSING DATA

Year 2017, Volume: 18 Issue: 1, 238 - 246, 31.03.2017

Uğur Avdan Gordana Kaplan

https://doi.org/10.18038/aubtda.273972

Cited By: 2

Abstract

Snow cover is an important part of the
Earth`s climate system so its continuous monitoring is necessary to map snow
cover in high resolution. Satellite remote sensing is a science that
successfully can monitor land cover and land cover changes. Although indexes
such as Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) has quite good accuracy,
sometimes topography shadow, water bodies and clouds can be easily misplaced as
snow. Using Landsat TM, Landsat +ETM and Landsat TIRS/OLI satellite images, the
NDSI was modified for more accurate snow mapping. In this paper, elimination of
the misplaced water bodies was made using the high reflectance of the snow in
the 0.45 – 0.52 µm wavelength. Afterwards, the modified NDSI (MNDSI) was used
for estimating snow cover through the years on the one of the highest mountains
in Republic of Macedonia. The results from this study shows that the MNDSI
accuracy is higher than the NDSI`s, totally eliminating the misplaced water
bodies, and partly the one caused from topography and clouds. Also, it was
noticed that the snow cover in the study area has not been changed drastically
through the years. For future studies, the MNDSI should be validated on
different study areas with different characteristics.  

Keywords

Remote Sensing, Snow Monitoring, Landsat, MNDSI

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