Das Projekt "SNOW-TOOLS: Research and Development of Remote Sensing Methods with Main Focus on Snow Hydrology" wird/wurde gefördert durch: Bundesamt für Bildung und Wissenschaft. Es wird/wurde ausgeführt durch: Universität Bern, Institut für Angewandte Physik.This is a shared-cost action proposal with the objective to: Develop generic methods for correction and interpretation of optical and microwave data with the main aim of generating high-level products, improving the information content in microwave and optical data, and development of techniques for information extraction specific to snow hydrology. The methodological research and development will focus on developing generic methods lo be generally applicable, and the methods will support generation of high-level end products, e.g. snow extent, melt onset and snow water equivalent (SWE) estimates. The methods will handle the nearby remote sensing scenario where data from several satellites and often multitemporal and ancillary data should be applied to obtain the desired information. Dedicated experiments for acquisition of space- and airborne data combined with ground truth measurements will be performed. These data combined with already existing data will form the basis for the development of inversion algorithm and for demonstration of the generic tools in an hydrological application. The data will be used as input to models in order to improve the accuracy of seasonal and short-term snowmelt run-off prediction. The project team consist of scientists in remote sensing and hydrology which during the last years have made significant contributions to the development of algorithms for retrieval of geophysical parameters from remote sensing data, and in particular snow parameter extraction. By close cooperating with the end users unambigous user requirements will be derived and dissimination of the results to potential users ensured. The proposal is submitted to the Environment and Climate programme under theme 3.1.1. The proposal is relevant to the theme since it focus on methodological research and development of generic tools which improves measurements of snow cover and properties.