The objective of the project is to develop a sustainable satellite-based snow cover monitoring service provide by KSAT in Tromsø for governmental agencies in Norway and Sweden. The service is one of the services provided through the Polar View project of the European Space Agency (ESA). The long-term project goal is to merge this service with the service developed in the EO-Hydro project for the commercial market in Norway and Sweden resulting in the establishment of a joint service satisfying both governmental and commercial users.

 

A prototype snow cover monitoring service has been developed and demonstrated by NR and NORUT-IT within a series of projects (including the projects EnviSnow, SnowMan and EuroClim). The snow product provides a map of the current fractional snow cover (FSC) area, which is a percentage of snow cover per pixel based. The product is based on a multi-sensor time series algorithm fusing optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. Relevant data sources include Terra MODIS, ENVISAT ASAR and Radarsat.

 

NR’s role in the project is to provide the optical FSC retrieval algorithm, contribute to the multi-sensor time-series algorithm, provide parts of the product processing chain and contribute with improvements to all these as the project obtains further experience from service provision to the users.