Snow Wetness And Density Estimation Using Space Based Synthetic Aperture Radar Data

Vol. 2 No. 1

Year: 2012

Issue: Dec-Feb

Title: Snow Wetness And Density Estimation Using Space Based Synthetic Aperture Radar Data 

Author Name: Praveen Thakur, Rahul D Garg , Pradeep K Garg 

Synopsis: 

The current study has been done using space based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data to estimate the snow wetness and snow density in Manali watershed of Beas River, Himachal Pradesh, India. SAR data used is dual co-polarized (HH/VV) data of Environmental Satellite (ENVISAT), Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) and Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS)-Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) data. SAR based inversion models were implemented in Mathematica and MATLAB, and has been used for finding wet and dry snow dielectric constant, snow wetness and snow density. Maps of forest cover, layover and shadow were used to mask these areas in snow parameter estimation. Overall accuracy in terms of R2 value comes out to be 0.86 for snow wetness and, 0.85 for snow density based on ground truth data for subset area of Manali sub-basin of Beas river upto Manali.