Developments for snowpack water equivalent monitoring using Radarsat data as input to the Hydrotel hydrological model

A distributed hydrological model and an algorithm to extract snow water equivalent (SWE) from Radarsat data have been developed in parallel over the past years. Previous studies showed that the hydrological model can take advantage of updated SWE, as data from other sources become available, to improve accuracy of spring runoff simulation. However, Radarsat derived SWE, as promising as is it, showed a high sensitivity to the spatial distribution of the snow density which is required as input. This paper proposes a methodology for SWE monitoring that is based on integrating the two previous approaches with snow survey data.