What was the purpose of the campaign?

The overall objective of the SnowLab-NG activity was to provide a comprehensive multi-frequency, multi-polarisation, multi-temporal dataset and active and passive microwave measurements over snow-covered grounds to investigate the relationship between effective snow and ground parameters and the resultant signals detected by microwave radars and radiometers. A second objective was to understand the spatial variability of snow thermal inertia and therewith to explore the synergies of thermal inertia and microwave remote sensing data. SnowLab-NG is the successor of the SnowLab campaign.

What was the outcome of the campaign?

The SnowLab-NG campaign took place during two winter seasons in Davos-Laret, Switzerland (2019-2020) and in Sodankylä, Finland (2020-2021). During both seasons, multi-frequency active and passive (M-F A&P) close-range microwave measurements were performed simultaneously with in-situ observations of snow and ground. The main instrument used was the Wide-Band Scatterometer (WBScat).

There exist numerous key differences between SnowLab-NG’s site for the first (Davos-Laret, Switzerland) and the second (Sondankylä, Finland) measurement campaigns. These differences include climate, underlying ground’s freeze/thaw state, snow cover properties, and length of the snow cover period in each winter, exposure to radiation given vastly different lengths of days etc. Thus, performing the second campaign over the Arctic circle at FMI-ARC gives the chance to study which type of information about snow and its subnivean layer can be extracted from a similar set of measurements and whether and to what extent the findings in an alpine site are applicable to the high latitude arctic region and vice versa.

Download the SnowLab-NG Final Report

Digital Object Identifier: European Space Agency, 2019, SnowLab-NG, https://doi.org/10.57780/esa-3cc9af8

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