Weather history encoding for machine learning-based snow avalanche detection

Abstract

<p><span>Since its start in 2014, the Copernicus Sentinel-1 programme has provided free of charge, weather independent, and high-resolution satellite Earth observations and has set major scientific advances in the detection of snow avalanches from satellite imagery in motion. Recently, operational avalanche detection from Sentinel-1 synthetic Aperture radar (SAR) images were successfully introduced for some test regions in Norway.</span> <span>However, current state of the art avalanche detection algorithms based on machine learning do not include weather history. We propose a novel way to encode weather data and include it into an automatic avalanche detection pipeline for the Austrian Alps.</span> <span>The approach consists of four steps. At first the raw data in netCDF format is downloaded, which consists of several meteorological parameters over several time steps. In the second step the weather data is downscaled onto the pixel locations of the SAR image. Then the data is aggregated over time, which produces a two-dimensional grid of one value per SAR pixel at the time when the SAR data was recorded. This aggregation function can range from simple averages to full snowpack models. In the final step, the grid is then converted to an image with greyscale values corresponding to the aggregated values. The resulting image is then ready to be fed into the machine learning pipeline.</span> <span>We will include this encoded weather history data to increase the avalanche detection performance, and investigate contributing factors with model interpretability tools and explainable artificial intelligence.</span></p>