High Asia is very sensitive to climate change, and is a hot area of global change research. The changes of temperature and precipitation will be reflected in the freezing and thawing time of ice and snow. Satellite microwave remote sensing can provide continuous monitoring ability of ice and snow surface state in time and space. When a small part of ice and snow begins to melt, micro liquid water will also be reflected in active and passive microwave remote sensing signals. In the microwave band, the dielectric constant of ice and liquid water is very different, so it provides a basic theory for the microwave remote sensing monitoring of ice and snow melting. In the case of passive microwave, when ice and snow begin to melt and liquid water appears, its absorption and emissivity increase rapidly, so its emissivity, brightness temperature and backscatter coefficient will also change rapidly. This data set is the initial time of ice and snow melting in the high Asia region retrieved by using the satellite microwave radiometer and scatterometer observations from 1979 to 2018. The passive microwave remote sensing data are SMMR on satellite (1979-1987) and SSM / i-ssmis radiometer on DMSP (1988 present). The active microwave remote sensing data is the QuikSCAT satellite scatterometer (2000-2009).

File naming and required software

GeoTIFF format. Passive microwave data: am.tif is the start time of snow melting extracted from transit satellite data in the morning, pm.tif is the start time of snow melting extracted from transit satellite data in the afternoon. Among them, band 1 is the snow melting time in spring 2018, band 2 is the snow melting time in spring 2017, and so on. The unit is day of year. Band 41 is DEM, and band 42 is DEM filtered by snow cover in a certain year. Active microwave data: AAAA QSCAT? DOM? Bbb.tif, AAAA is the year, BBB is the lifting track, ASC is the lifting track, DES is the lowering track. The unit is day of year.

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Cite as:

Xiong, C., Shi, J., Yao, R., Lei, Y., Pan, J. (2020). Snowmelt onset time of High Mountain Asia (1979-2018). A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.11888/Snow.tpdc.270307. CSTR: 18406.11.Snow.tpdc.270307. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

Related Literatures:

1. Xiong, C., Shi, J., Cui, Y., & Peng, B. (2017). Snowmelt Pattern Over High-Mountain Asia Detected From Active and Passive Microwave Remote Sensing. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 14, 1096–1100. doi: 10.1109/LGRS.2017.2698448( View Details | Bibtex)

2. Xiong, C., Yao, R.Z., Shi, J.C., Lei, Y.H., Pan, J.M. (2019). Change of snow and ice melting time in High Mountain Asia. Chinese Science Bulletin, 64(27), 2885-2893. (in Chinese)( View Details | Bibtex)

Using this data, the data citation is required to be referenced and the related literatures are suggested to be cited.

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Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition Program

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