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Spatiotemporal Variation of Snow Cover from Space in Northern Xinjiang

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Water Resources Research in Northwest China

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Abstract

Snow is an appreciable fraction of soil water recharge in the middle and high latitude areas, and snow cover and snow depth estimation is extremely important for regional climate change studies, agriculture and water source management. Traditional in situ measurments provide critical snow depth observations in limited areas and for ground control validation of remotely sensed estimations. Satellite-based snow measurements have revolutionized the monitoring of spatiotemporal variation of snow cover and snow depth in complex natural conditions at regional and global scales. This chaper introduces the algorithm of optical satellite snow cover detection and MODIS standard snow cover products, sumarizes recent studies on mitigating the cloud-blockage issues in MODIS snow cover products and their applications, and finally illustrates the spatiotemporal variatons of snow cover in the Northern Xinjiang, China by using the cloud-removed MODIS snow cover product. Together, snow cover days (SCD), snow cover index (SCI), snow cover onset date (SCOD) and snow cover end date (SCED) provide important information on the snow cover conditions and can be applied in any region of interests. These information would be critical for local government, such as land use planning, agriculture, live stock, and water resource management, for example, to mitigate snow-caused disasters and to plan for agriculture and industry water use. Long term availability of MODIS type of snow cover data for producing such datasets is key to study the connection between snow cover variation and climate change.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center of Integrated Geographic Information Analysis, School of Geography and Planning, and Guangdong Key Laboratory for Urbanization and Geo-simulation, Sun Yat-sen University, No. 135 West Xingang Road, 510275, Guangzhou, China

    Xianwei Wang

  2. Laboratory for Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics, Department of Geological Science, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, 78249, USA

    Hongjie Xie

  3. College of Pastoral Agriculture Science and Technology, Lanzhou University, No. 222 South Tianshui Road, 730020, Lanzhou, China

    Tiangang Liang

Authors
  1. Xianwei Wang
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  2. Hongjie Xie
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  3. Tiangang Liang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xianwei Wang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xinjiang, Xinjiang, China

    Yaning Chen

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Wang, X., Xie, H., Liang, T. (2014). Spatiotemporal Variation of Snow Cover from Space in Northern Xinjiang. In: Chen, Y. (eds) Water Resources Research in Northwest China. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8017-9_6

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