Abstract

A variety of canopy metrics were extracted from the snow-off airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) measurements over three study areas in the central and southern Sierra Nevada. Two of the sites, Providence andWolverton, had wireless snow-depth sensors since 2008, with the third site, Pinecrest having sensors since 2014. AtWolverton and Pinecrest, images were captured and the sky-view factors were derived from hemispherical-view photos. We found the variation of snow accumulation across the landscape to be significantly related to canopy-cover conditions. Using a regularized regression model Elastic Net to model the normalized snow accumulation with canopy metrics as independent variables, we found that about 50% of snow accumulation variability at each site can be explained by the canopy metrics from lidar.

Citation

Zheng, Z.; Ma, Q.; Qian, K.; Bales, R.C. (2018): Canopy Effects on Snow Accumulation: Observations from Lidar, Canonical-View Photos, and Continuous Ground Measurements from Sensor Networks. Remote Sensing, 10, 1769. DOI: 10.3390/rs10111769

This Paper/Book acknowledges NSF CZO grant support.