Remote sensing of snow – a review of available methods

The use of satellite remote sensing for the mapping of snow-cover characteristics has a long-lasting history reaching back until the 1960s. Because snow cover plays an important role in the Earth's climate system, it is necessary to map snow-cover extent and snow mass in both high temporal and high spatial resolutions. This task can only be achieved by the use of remotely sensed data. Many different sensors have been used in the past decades with various algorithms and respective accuracies. This article provides an overview of the most common methods. The limitations, advantages and drawbacks will be illustrated while error sources and strategies on how to ease their impact will be reviewed. Beginning with a short summary of the physical and spectral properties of snow, methods to map snow extent from the reflective part of the spectrum, algorithms to estimate snow water equivalent (SWE) from passive microwave (PM) data and the combination of both spectra will be delineated. At the end, the reader should have an overarching overview of what is currently possible and the difficulties that can occur in the context of snow-cover mapping from the reflective and microwave parts of the spectrum.