Abstract
This article presents a new nondestructive characterization system for the extraction of both snow density and liquid water content (LWC). The experiment primarily measures the relative complex permittivity of snow ( $\overline {{{\boldsymbol{\varepsilon }}_{\boldsymbol{s}}}} $ ) at microwave frequencies at 4–6 GHz. The density and LWC are then deduced with high accuracy from an empirical model of the literature that has been experimentally validated in this study.
Highlights
THE knowledge of the snow water equivalent (SWE) of a snowpack, or in an equivalent manner its effective density ρ, is important to predict the water resources in the mountains, especially for hydroelectric dams [1] [2]
These data can be obtained by traditional snow pit observations or by several kind of electromagnetic measurement methods, which are all based on the relation between the complex permittivity (ε = ε − jε ) and the duplet (ρ, liquid water content (LWC))
The possibility to use an electromagnetic test bench using a vector network analyzer (VNA) to extract very precisely the effective density from the real part of the dielectric permittivity has been demonstrated for a dry snowpack in [12], [13]
Summary
THE knowledge of the snow water equivalent (SWE) of a snowpack, or in an equivalent manner its effective density ρ , is important to predict the water resources in the mountains, especially for hydroelectric dams [1] [2]. The possibility to use an electromagnetic test bench using a vector network analyzer (VNA) to extract very precisely the effective density from the real part of the dielectric permittivity has been demonstrated for a dry snowpack in [12], [13]. All these methods only measure a delay time or a phase shift, only allowing the determination of the real part of the snow permittivity ε. We will compare the density extract from measurement with the complex permittivity to the density extract from a manual measurement
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