Satellite inspired hydrology in an uncertain future: a H SAF and HEPEX workshop

Reliable snow cover extent is of vital importance in order to have a comprehensive understanding for present and future climate, hydrological, and ecological dynamics. Development of methodologies to obtain reliable snow cover information by means of optical remote sensing (RS) has long been one of the most active research topics of the RS community. In this study EUMETSAT snow cover products namely H10 and H34 are presented. H-SAF H10 and H34 are daily operational products of snow extent generated from the visible (VIS) and infrared (IR) radiometry of the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) instrument on Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellites. The high temporal resolution and wide aerial coverage of SEVIRI imagery make it highly suitable for snow-cover mapping. Indeed, the daily snow cover product is derived for a multi-temporal analysis of SEVIRI 15-min images, that are processed as new data are available to collect the largest possible number of cloud-free pixels. The resulting daily map having 5km spatial resolution consists of four different classes: snow, cloud, water and bare land. H10 snow product has a spatial coverage delimited between longitude 25_ W–45_ E and latitude 25_–75_ N and H34 has full disc coverage.