Download or read book Using Remote Sensing Data Fusion Modeling to Track Seasonal Snow Cover in a Mountain Watershed written by Allison N. Vincent and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Seasonal snowfall is the largest component of the water budget in many mountain headwater regions around the world. In addition to sustaining biological water needs in drier, lower elevation areas throughout the year, mountain snowpack also provides essential water inputs to the Critical Zone (CZ) - the outer layer of the Earth’s surface, which hosts a variety of biogeochemical processes responsible for transforming inorganic matter into forms usable for life. Water is a known driver of CZ activity, but uncertainty exists in its spatial and temporal interactions with CZ processes, particularly in the complex terrain of heterogeneous mountain areas. Increasing pressure on the CZ due to climate change and human land use needs creates an urgency to better understand the CZ system and how it may change in the future. An important variable for water driven CZ behaviors in mountain areas is the spatial extent of snow, also known as snow-covered area (SCA). SCA in mountain areas can change quickly over small scales of time and space with large impacts on the rest of the system. It has been difficult historically, however, to measure snowpack extent for large areas on very fine spatial and temporal scales due to a lack of remote sensing datasets with both of these fine scale characteristics. In this study we use the Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (STARFM) to fill this historic knowledge gap for the East River watershed in Colorado, USA. By fusing low spatial and high temporal resolution data from MODIS (500-m, daily) with high spatial and low temporal resolution data from Landsat (30-m, 16 days), a fine resolution, 30-m daily dataset can be created. This study is one of the first to use this model with the primary intent of monitoring SCA in a mountain watershed."--Boise State University ScholarWorks.