Abstract
Abstract. The High Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring Service was launched in 2020 to provide near-real-time, pan-European snow and ice information at 20 m resolution from Sentinel-2 observations. Here we present an evaluation of the snow detection using a database of snow depth observations from 1764 stations across Europe over the hydrological year 2016–2017. We find a good agreement between both datasets with an accuracy (proportion of correct classifications) of 94 % and kappa of 0.81. More accurate (+6 % kappa) retrievals are obtained by excluding low-quality pixels at the cost of a reduced coverage (−13 % data).
Highlights
The snow cover area, defined as the spatial extent of the snow cover on the land surface (Fierz et al, 2009), is a key variable in many hydrology, climatology and ecology studies
The comparison between in situ–satellite matchups was performed by computing a confusion matrix and the derived false positive (FP), false negative (FN), true positive (TP), true negative (TN), recall or fraction of successfully identified positives (TP/(TP + FN)), precision (TP/(TP + FP)), accuracy ((TP + TN)/(TP + FP + FN + TN)), and kappa coefficient (κ)
The false negative rate is higher than the false positive rate
Summary
The snow cover area, defined as the spatial extent of the snow cover on the land surface (Fierz et al, 2009), is a key variable in many hydrology, climatology and ecology studies. Earth observation satellites have been used to routinely map the snow cover area at continental scale since the late 1960s (Matson and Wiesnet, 1981). Such observations are increasingly used for meteorological, climate, hydrological, ecosystem and natural hazards applications. The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites has listed 19 operational remote sensing products which provide information on the spatial extent of the snow cover as either binary (snow/no-snow) or fractional (snow-covered fraction of the pixel area) representation. High-resolution snow cover maps can be useful for outdoor activities
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