Snow physical parameters estimation using space-based Synthetic Aperture Radar

This study has been done using Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to estimate the snow physical properties (snow wetness and snow density), in Manali sub-basin of Himachal Pradesh, India. The SAR data used are of Radarsat-2 (RS2) and Environmental Satellite, Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). SAR-based inversion models were implemented in Mathematica and MATLAB, and have been used for finding out wet and dry snow dielectric constant, snow wetness and snow density. The SAR-based inversion models were implemented separately for fully polarimetric RS2 and dual polarimetric ASAR Alternate Polarization System datasets. Masks for forest, built area, layover and shadow were considered in estimating snow parameters. The overall accuracy in terms of R 2 value comes out to be 0.86 for snow wetness and 0.84-0.72 for snow density based on the ground truth data for subset area of Manali sub-basin of Beas river up to Manali.