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Estimating snow-cover trends from space

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 924–928 (2018)Cite this article

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Extensive evidence reveals that Earth’s snow cover is declining, but our ability to monitor trends in mountain regions is limited. New satellite missions with robust snow water equivalent retrievals are needed to fill this gap.

Seasonal snow is a fundamental component of both the global energy and water cycles. Through strong interaction with the surface energy budget, snow cover has a large-scale cooling effect on the global climate system1. Snow cover directly insulates underlying soil, influences the spatial distribution of permafrost conditions and active layer dynamics, and therefore plays a first-order role in modulating the potential release of large stores of carbon and methane into the atmosphere2 — and their consequent feedbacks in the Earth system.

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Fig. 1: Spatial distribution of historical snow-cover duration and SWE over the Northern Hemisphere.
Fig. 2: The spatial distribution of snow-cover trends across the Northern Hemisphere with time series for four mountain regions.

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Acknowledgements

Part of this work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under contract with NASA. K.J.B. and T.H.P. were funded by NASA’s Terrestrial Hydrology, Cryospheric Sciences and Applied Sciences programmes.

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Affiliations

  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Kat J. Bormann & Thomas H. Painter

  2. Climate Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada @ Ouranos, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Ross D. Brown

  3. Climate Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Chris Derksen

Authors
  1. Kat J. Bormann
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  2. Ross D. Brown
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  3. Chris Derksen
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  4. Thomas H. Painter
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Correspondence to Kat J. Bormann.

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Bormann, K.J., Brown, R.D., Derksen, C. et al. Estimating snow-cover trends from space. Nature Clim Change 8, 924–928 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0318-3

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