Snow cover is spatially and temporally variable and is often concentrated in remote or inaccessible land regions making spaceborne remote sensing the most feasible approach to measure and monitor snow cover change. Landsat’s spatial resolution offers the capability to resolve snow cover patterns across topographically complex mountainous regions.
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While Landsat’s acquisition frequency limits analysis of short-term snow cover variations, longer term changes in snow cover duration and persistence can be detected. The Landsat Fractional Snow Covered Area (fSCA) product provides per-pixel fractional snow cover maps that indicate the percentage of a pixel covered by snow.
The table below displays how different communities use Landsat fSCA products in their research.
Community | Potential Use |
---|---|
Colorado State University | Western U.S. snowpack |
Various conference connections | Planning and management of fire occurrence or managed lands |
Landsat science | Reference for other Landsat Science Products |
The images below are examples of how Landsat Fractional Snow Covered Area data are used.
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Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Fractional Snow Covered Area science product
The Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Fractional Snow Covered Area science product indicates the percentage of pixels covered by snow for Landsat 4–9 imagery. Landsat’s spatial resolution offers the capability to map snow cover patterns across topographically complex mountainous regions. Snow cover is spatially and temporally variable and is often concentrated in remote or inaccessible land regions, maPrevalence of pure versus mixed snow cover pixels across spatial resolutions in alpine environments: implications for binary and fractional remote sensing approaches
Remote sensing of snow-covered area (SCA) can be binary (indicating the presence/absence of snow cover at each pixel) or fractional (indicating the fraction of each pixel covered by snow). Fractional SCA mapping provides more information than binary SCA, but is more difficult to implement and may not be feasible with all types of remote sensing data. The utility of fractional SCA mapping relativeAuthorsDavid J. Selkowitz, Richard Forster, Megan K. Caldwell - Web Tools
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