Publications

Kadlec, J; Ames, DP (2017). Using crowdsourced and weather station data to fill cloud gaps in MODIS snow cover datasets. ENVIRONMENTAL MODELLING & SOFTWARE, 95, 258-270.

Abstract
We present the design, development, and testing of a new software package for generating snow cover maps. Using a custom inverse distance weighting method, we combine volunteer snow reports, cross-country ski track reports and station measurements to fill cloud gaps in the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) snow cover product. The method is demonstrated by producing a continuous daily time step snow probability map dataset for the Czech Republic region. For validation, we checked the ability of our method to reconstruct MODIS snow cover under cloud by simulating cloud cover datasets and comparing estimated snow cover to actual MODIS snow cover. The percent correctly classified indicator showed accuracy between 80 and 90% using this method. The software is available as an R package. The output data sets are published on the HydroShare website for download and through a web map service for re-use in third-party applications. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

DOI:
10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.06.002

ISSN:
1364-8152