Snow is composed of ice crystals of various shapes and sizes with possible inclusion of pollutants such as soot, dust, and biological matter. It is highly reflective substance in the visible. Due to this factor and also to its large spatial extent snow significantly influences the albedo of the Earth.
This session is aimed at remote sensing of snow microphysical properties (snow grain size, snow specific surface area), macrophysical properties (surface roughness and topography), snow optical thickness, pollution load, snow albedo (spectral and broadband) using ground – based, airborne, and satellite optical instrumentation. Also, theoretical approaches for the calculation of snow spectral, polarization, and angular radiative characteristics will be presented in this session. Special attention will be given to the development of inversion theory for retrieval of snow properties from remote sensing data. Retrievals of snow properties using satellite imagers such as MODIS, SGLI, OLCI, SLSTR, and others will be discussed.