The Validation of Snow Cover Product Over High Mountain Asia

Abstract

Many algorithms and products for snow cover have been developed. Then a unified set of “ground truth” data is important to validate snow cover products. In this study, Landsat-8/OLI data processed by linear unmixing algorithm was determined as “ground truth” to validate the moderate resolution snow products. In order to evaluate the cloud removing effect of the daily fractional snow cover (FSC) dataset of MODIS over High Asia, we use the MOD10A1 FSC product which is calculated by recommended equations as the before cloud removing data, then the Landsat-8/OLI FSC was used to validate both of the MODIS data. The results show that when the percentage of cloud pixels is less than 10%, the binary accuracy can reach 0.85 or more, the mean absolute error is less than 0.25, and the root mean square error is less than 0.35. These results suggest that the product has high credibility, despite there is still a small amount of cloud in the product.