Monitoring the snow water equivalent in the Piave headwater applying a remotely sensed based approach

Information about the temporal and spatial variability of the snow water equivalent (SWE) is required for several hydrological applications. However the use of point measurements at snow gauges is often not sufficient to calculate accurately the amount of water temporally stored in the snowpack at the basin scale. In this study an enhanced approach is presented that computes over a decade the SWE in five Alpine catchments all located in the headwater of the Piave river basin in the eastern part of the Italian Alps. The method to derive a more accurate amount of spatially distributed SWE takes into account enhanced snow classification of NOAA/AVHRR data, the physiogeographic characteristics of the considered catchment taken from GIS analyses and ground based measurements. The method intends to be easily manageable and is becoming an operational system. The results are validated to SWE amounts calculated by a temperature index model. Moreover several error sources that have to be taken into account are addressed.