SNOW COVER MONITORING BY SYNERGISTIC USE OF SENTINEL-3 SLSTR AND SENTINEL-1 SAR DATA

The Sentinel satellite missions of the European Copernicus programme provide comprehensive data for long-term routine observations of the global environment. A key parameter for climate monitoring, hydrology and water management is the seasonal snow cover. We developed, implemented and tested a novel approach for monitoring snow extent and snowmelt area, exploiting the synergy of imaging radar of the Sentinel-1 mission and multispectral optical imagery of the SLSTR sensor on Sentinel-3. We describe the processing steps and algorithms for generating the synergistic snow cover product and show examples for snow cover maps over Europe based on single mission data as well as the final synergistic product.