Deriving snow liquid water content using C-band polarimetric SAR

In hydrological investigations, modeling and forecasting of snow melt runoff requires information about snowpack properties and their spatial variability. In particular, timely measurement of snow parameters is needed for operational hydrology. The liquid water content of snowpack is one of the important parameters. This paper reports a study of algorithm development and testing for snow wetness retrieval using C-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar SAR imagery. This algorithm is based on the first-order scattering model with consideration of both surface and volume scattering. Test results using JPL AIRSAR data show that the authors´ algorithms can be used to provide quantitative estimates of liquid water content in top layer of a snowpack