Fractional snow cover estimation in Tibetan Plateau using MODIS and ASTER

Abstract

Seasonal snow cover plays a significant role in regional, large even global scale climate processes, hydrological cycle and surface thermal balance processes. MODIS snow cover methods provide an operational model for mapping each pixel into snow or no-snow by using a normalized difference snow Index (NDSI) and its threshold test. But they cannot provide the fractional snow cover information. This paper presents an automated snow-mapping technique at sub-pixel resolution in Tibetan Plateau based on MODIS normalized difference snow fraction and normalized difference Vegetation fraction. This paper presents an automated snow-mapping technique at sub-pixel resolution based on MODIS normalized difference snow Index (NDSI) and normalized Difference Vegetation Index(NDVI) in order to avoid overestimations due to vegetation cover. And it takes the ASTER data as ground true data to verified this method.