Monitoring of the Seasonal Snow Cover

Dear Colleagues,

About one third of Earth’s landmass is seasonally covered by snow. In the higher latitudes and mountain regions, snow dominates the landscape for over half a year. It is one of the essential factors affecting Earth’s energy balance. Due to its retention capacity, it plays an important role in the water cycle, reshaping the hydrographs affecting the hydrological resources. Last but not least, seasonal snow cover is highly influenced by Climate Change. As a matter of exceptional sensitivity to prevailing meteorological and topographic conditions, snow cover undergoes rapid spatial and temporal dynamics, requiring a multiseasonal approach. Efforts to monitor snowpack properties (e.g., snow depth, snow density, snow water equivalent, snowpack distribution, snow extent and onset dates, among many others) are extremely important to our understanding of the water cycle and energy budget in the changing climate. Despite its importance, snowpack monitoring presents obvious challenges, causing a generalized lack of observations with scarce or too-short time series, making it difficult to study the snow cover at different spatio-temporal scales. Thus, snow monitoring initiatives are of crucial importance for the scientific community, to assess the impacts of the current Climate Change.

This Special Issue invites and encourages the submission of all manuscripts covering long- and short-term snow-monitoring activities, snow instrumentation/sensors, monitoring schemes and methodology, and applications where snow monitoring data are used, including, but not limited to:

• In-situ measurements of snow parameters;
• Short and long-range remote sensing of snowpack;
• Spatial and temporal snowpack variability;
• Snow hydrology;
• Avalanches;
• Novel techniques in snow monitoring (e.g., UAV, TLS, etc.).

Dr. Bartłomiej Luks
Dr. Michał Laska
Mr. Esteban Alonso-González
Guest Editors

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