Monitoring snow cover changes and their relationships with temperature over the Tibetan Plateau using MODIS data

Abstract

Monitoring the snow cover changes on Tibet Plateau (TP) is significant to understand the regional impact of ongoing global warming. In this paper, we firstly propose a cloud removal methodology (CRM) to remove the cloud obscuration from MODIS fractional snow cover (FSC) products. Then, the spatial and temporal variations of snow cover over the TP, and how they are related to the changing temperature are analyzed using the cloud removed MODIS FSC data from 2001 to 2011 as well as in-situ temperature data. Results show that the CRM has a higher accuracy in cloud removal (overall mean absolute error is 0.092). There is a very high inter-annual and intra-seasonal variability of snow cover in the 11 years. The inter-annual fluctuation of snow cover can be explained by the high negative correlations between the snow cover and the in situ temperature.