Calibration/validation of satellite derived snow products with in situ data over the mountainous eastern part of Turkey

Abstract

This paper presents the critical issues for the comparison of the parameters that optical remote sensing can deliver (snow-covered area and albedo as MODIS products) with snow survey and lately established automated weather observation stations (AWOS). The use of Earth Observation (EO) satellite images and products in hydrological applications for mountainous terrain, where the scarcity of ground data is the main problem, is discussed.The snowmelt runoff hydrograph shape is affected by the elevation bias of the MODIS snow-mapping algorithms, and underestimates the area at lower altitudes and overestimates the area in the higher elevation regions. It is an aim to overcome this difficultly in further studies by determining the fractional snow-covered area using multi-sensor data (SEVIRI, NOAA, MODIS as optical, and AMSR-E, SSM/I as microwave), which will be the basic task for future studies in Satellite Application Facilities on Hydrology (H-SAF) project, which is financially supported by EUMETSAT. Turkey is a part ofthe H-SAF project, both in cal/val of satellite-derived snow products withground observations and cal/val studies with hydrological modelling in themountainous terrain of Europe. In this paper, the early findings of the H-SAF project regarding the products for mountainous regions are evaluated. Copyright © 2007 IAHS Press.