Articles | Volume 27, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-27-21-2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-27-21-2023
Research article
 | 
02 Jan 2023
Research article |  | 02 Jan 2023

Estimating spatiotemporally continuous snow water equivalent from intermittent satellite observations: an evaluation using synthetic data

Xiaoyu Ma, Dongyue Li, Yiwen Fang, Steven A. Margulis, and Dennis P. Lettenmaier

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Cited articles

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Short summary
We explore satellite retrievals of snow water equivalent (SWE) along hypothetical ground tracks that would allow estimation of SWE over an entire watershed. The retrieval of SWE from satellites has proved elusive, but there are now technological options that do so along essentially one-dimensional tracks. We use machine learning (ML) algorithms as the basis for a track-to-area (TTA) transformation and show that at least one is robust enough to estimate domain-wide SWE with high accuracy.