Accuracy analysis for an improved daily cloud-free snow cover product on Tibetan Plateau

Monitoring the extent and pattern of snow cover in the high altitude, Tibetan Plateau (TP) region is significant to understand the local and regional impact of ongoing climate change and variability. The freely available Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) snow cover images, with 500 m spatial and daily temporal resolution, can provide a basis for regional snow cover mapping, monitoring and hydrological modeling. However, high cloud obscuration remains the main limitation. In this study, a new MODIS daily cloud-free snow cover product was generated by integrated and improved the current cloud reducing approaches. The result shows that the daily cloud-free snow cover product not only has the advantages of AMSR-E (unaffected by weather conditions) and MODIS (relatively higher resolution), but also the high snow and overall classification accuracies (∼85% and ∼98%, respectively), much higher than those of existing daily snow cover products in all sky conditions, and are very closer to or even slightly higher than those in clear sky condition of the daily MODIS products.