Area retrieval of melting snow in alpine areas

This paper developed a method of mapping wet snow and dry snow in alpine terrain based on multi-polarimetric and mono temporal ASAR data in the snow melting season.14 ASAR images were used to obtain the variation of the backscattering coefficients of snow covered areas in the snow melting process. Shi´s method combining intensity and polarization property is taken as a reference to retrieve wet snow. DEM data was also used to retrieve dry snow. In order to verify the accuracy of the result, we made a scale conversion to images resulting from the ASAR data to match with the MODIS image and found an overall accuracy of 82.04%. The Google Earth image was also used as an aided verification. The results are all found to show a good estimation of the snow covered areas.