A Review of the Research on Snow Cover Monitored with Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR)

Snow is one of the most important elements in cryosphere.Most of snow cover is located in the remote regions where access is difficult and the climate and transportation conditions are poor.Thus remote sensing technology becomes a very useful and efficient method to obtain the snow information.Compared with optical remote sensing and passive microwave remote sensing,synthetic aperture radar(SAR) not only has the capabilities of penetrating clouds and providing day and night remote sensing data,but also has the capability of penetrating snow cover to retrieve subsurface information.In this review,the snow cover researches by SAR data in recent years,including several existing algorithms of SAR and InSAR to identify snow cover and estimate of snow water equivalent,snow depth,snow density and snow wetness,are described.