Cryosphere Studies

Snow Melt Freeze

A methodology to detect and monitor snow melt and freeze from microwave scatterometer data (OSCAT) onboard OCEANSAT2 and QuikSCAT data is developed. The backscatter response of dry and wet snow was observed to be high and low, respectively at Ku band. This observation enabled to employ a threshold based approach to identify melt/freeze status.

Temporal analysis of data for different observations in Indian Himalaya shows that a single, fixed threshold satisfies determination of dry snow from wet snow. Accordingly, a constant threshold (For each scatterometer) is used for entire area. HH polarization from QuikSCAT (January 2000 – November 2009) and OSCAT (November 2009- December 2013) is used to derive melt/freeze status. 

Fortnightly Snow cover fraction from 2003--2013 is hosted on Bhuvan-Snow Melt Freeze .

Select NICES Project – Cryospheric products –Snow cover fraction, List and view the data of the selected time period. Technical Document(hyper link :Snow Melt Freeze)