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Snow Cover Variability in Brunswick Peninsula, Patagonia, Derived from a Combination of Spectral Fusion, Mixture Analysis and Temporal Interpolation of MODIS Data
Aguirre, F.; Bozkurt, D.; Sauter, T.; Carrasco, J.; Schneider, C.; Jaña, R.; Casassa, G. Snow Cover Reconstruction in the Brunswick Peninsula, Patagonia, Derived from a Combination of the Spectral Fusion, Mixture Analysis, and Temporal Interpolation of MODIS Data. Remote Sens.2023, 15, 5430.
Aguirre, F.; Bozkurt, D.; Sauter, T.; Carrasco, J.; Schneider, C.; Jaña, R.; Casassa, G. Snow Cover Reconstruction in the Brunswick Peninsula, Patagonia, Derived from a Combination of the Spectral Fusion, Mixture Analysis, and Temporal Interpolation of MODIS Data. Remote Sens. 2023, 15, 5430.
Aguirre, F.; Bozkurt, D.; Sauter, T.; Carrasco, J.; Schneider, C.; Jaña, R.; Casassa, G. Snow Cover Reconstruction in the Brunswick Peninsula, Patagonia, Derived from a Combination of the Spectral Fusion, Mixture Analysis, and Temporal Interpolation of MODIS Data. Remote Sens.2023, 15, 5430.
Aguirre, F.; Bozkurt, D.; Sauter, T.; Carrasco, J.; Schneider, C.; Jaña, R.; Casassa, G. Snow Cover Reconstruction in the Brunswick Peninsula, Patagonia, Derived from a Combination of the Spectral Fusion, Mixture Analysis, and Temporal Interpolation of MODIS Data. Remote Sens. 2023, 15, 5430.
Abstract
Seasonal snow cover is a fundamental component of both the global energy budget and the water cycle. Its properties such as fractional snow cover or albedo are particularly affected by climate change. Several methods based on satellite data products are available to estimate these properties, each one with its pros and cons. This work presents a novel methodology that integrates three indexes applied to MODIS satellite data (Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA), Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) and Melt Area Detection Index (MADI)), to perform a spatio-temporal reconstruction of the fractional snow cover and albedo at 250 m spatial resolution in the Brunswick Peninsula, southwest Patagonia during the cold season (April-October) for the period 2000-2020. Three main steps are included: (1) the increase of the spatial resolution of MODIS (MOD09) data to 250 m using a spectral fusion technique; (2) the snow-cloud discrimination; (3) the daily spatio-temporal reconstruction of snow extent and its albedo signature with subpixel detection using the endmembers extraction and spectral mixture analysis. The results show a 98% agreement between MODIS snow detection and ground-based snow measurement at the automatic weather station Tres Morros (53.3174 °S, 71.2790 °W), with fractional snow cover values between 20% and 50%, showing a close relationship between snow and vegetation type. The number of snow days compiled from the MODIS data indicates a good performance (Pearson correlation of 0.9) compared with the number of skiing days at Cerro Mirador ski centre near Punta Arenas. Although the number of seasonal snow days show a significant increase trend of 0.54 days/year in Brunswick Peninsula during the 2000-2020 period a significant decreasing trend of -4.64 days/year was detected during 2010-2020, and also below the 400 m a.s.l. elevation, which is the most affected area. A reconstruction of the monthly mean temperature using the ERA5 Land reanalysis product shows a significant warming trend in May (0.068 ºC/year) and October (0.098 ºC/year) in the 2000-2020 period. Under the future emission scenario RCP8.5, the regional climate model RegCM4 predicts further warming during 2020-2050 of 0.059 ºC/year in July, 0.088 ºC/year in August, and 0.019 ºC/year in October, which will further reduce snow cover.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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