Assessment of albedo changes and their driving factors over the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau

Using the MODIS datasets, we assessed the spatial-temporal variations of land surface albedo driven by the changes of land cover such as snow, vegetation in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. The Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, called "the roof of the world", is located in E74°- E104°\´, N25°- N40° with an average elevation of over 4500 meter, where the main land cover types are grasslands and unused barren lands. Our results showed that the inter-annual trend of albedo was spatially correlated to snow cover variation, and its coefficient of determination with snow cover is greater than 0.5 over areas around northern meteorological stations from 2000 to 2009. The inter-annual variation of summer NDVI largely induced albedo change over the alpine meadow in the eastern region.