Advanced Remote Sensing, 2nd Edition

19.2. Snow microwave scattering and emission modeling

Dry snow is a mixture of ice and air; the underlying is often rough soil surfaces. In the interactions of microwaves with the terrestrial snow, the volume scattering of snow particles, the surface scattering from the snow–ground interface, snow layer boundary and air–snow interface, and the interaction between snow volume and rough soil surface need to be considered.

Microwave snow forward models are expected to accurately simulate the microwave scattering and emission characteristics of snow covered terrain. The forward models mainly include three parts under radiative transfer concept (Pan et al., 2016):

• (1) Snow microstructure representations: The representation of snow microstructure ...