Determination of snow depth using elevation differences determined by interferometric SAR (InSAR)

Snow accumulation is a significant factor for determining sources and amounts of seasonal runoff for a variety of applications. Most current estimates of snow depth, however, consist of manual (spot) measurements combined with weather models, and don´t capture snow depth information at appropriate scales for regional forecasting or local use. Remote sensing data have the potential to determine snow depth and other parameters for large areas that are difficult to measure directly using other methods. The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) is using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) to explore snow depth estimation approaches. SAR interferograms are calculated to produce digital elevation models (DEMs) for both snow-off and snow-on conditions - DEM subtraction provides an estimate of the snow depth over the area of the remotely sensed data.