Regions: North Slave Region
Tags: remote sensing, snow water equivalence, snow
| Principal Investigator: | English, Michael C (25) |
| Licence Number: | 13771 |
| Organization: | Wilfrid Laurier University |
| Licensed Year(s): |
2012
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
|
| Issued: | Apr 11, 2005 |
| Project Team: | Andrew Ree |
Objective(s): To date, the use of passive microwave remote sensing data to estimate and monitor snow cover properties in Canada has been primarily focused on the prairie and boreal forest regions. This project will improve the national snow water equivalent (SWE) monitoring capabilities by acquiring the necessary data to estimate SWE in the spatially expansive and persistently snow covered tundra environment. The project is a continuation of work begun in 2004 and is an on snow survey campaign for direct evaluation of spaceborne, airborne, and ground-based passive microwave SWE retrievals within a large sub-basin of the Coppermine River basin. Analysis to date suggests that systematic passive microwave SWE underestimation occurs in the open tundra environment, potentially as a result of the unique microwave emission and scattering characteristics of frozen lakes which comprise a high proportion of the surface area, as well as from uneven snow distribution. A multi-agency, collaborative field campaign will involve the acquisition of in-situ snow cover and lake ice data to correspond with the remotely sensed datasets. These datasets will allow consideration of lake coverage in the current SWE algorithm suites, and produce a tundra-specific SWE retrieval algorithm(s).
