학술논문

Estimation of Snow Mass Information via Assimilation of C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar Backscatter Observations Into an Advanced Land Surface Model
Document Type
article
Source
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, Vol 15, Pp 862-875 (2022)
Subject
Data assimilation (DA)
land surface model (LSM)
NASA land information system (LIS)
support vector machine (SVM)
synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
Ocean engineering
TC1501-1800
Geophysics. Cosmic physics
QC801-809
Language
English
ISSN
2151-1535
Abstract
This study assimilated Sentinel-1 C-band backscatter observations over snow-covered terrain into the Noah-Multiparameterization land surface model using support vector machine (SVM) regression and an ensemble Kalman filter to improve the modeled terrestrial snow mass estimates. The data assimilation (DA) experiment was conducted across Western Colorado from September 2016 to August 2017. As part of the DA experiments, the impact of a rule-based update was evaluated by comparing snow water equivalent (SWE) estimates via DA (with [${\rm {DA}}_{\rm {v1}}$] and without [${\rm {DA}}_{\rm {v2}}$] the rule-based update) against SNOTEL SWE measurements. Results confirmed that rule-based update helped minimize SVM controllability issues, and in turn, improved the accuracy of SWE estimates relative to both open loop (OL) and ${\rm {DA}}_{\rm {v2}}$. Comparison of SWE estimates from Sentinel-1 ${\rm {DA}}_{\rm {v1}}$ against SNOTEL SWE revealed that 75% of stations showed improvements in bias and correlation coefficient relative to the OL. Assimilated SWE estimates also showed statistical improvements during both the snow accumulation and snow ablation periods. However, unbiased root mean square error showed a slight increase during the snow ablation period due to the large variability in the electromagnetic response of C-band backscatter over deep and/or wet snow. Improvement of the SWE estimates also resulted in improving river discharge estimates compared to in situ measurements. River discharge using Sentinel-1 ${\rm {DA}}_{\rm {v1}}$ improved the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency at all available stations. These results suggest that physically constrained SVM can serve as an efficient observation operator for snow mass DA through explicit consideration of the first-order C-band scattering mechanisms over different terrestrial snow conditions.