Spatial and Temporal Variation Analysis of Snow Cover Using MODIS over Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau during 2003-2014

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) snow cover information acquisition of the high precision spatial and temporal characteristics is of great significance for the research on its land surface atmosphere coupled system and global climate change effects. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) daily snow cover products (MOD10A1 and MYD10A1) have been widely used in long time series of spatial and temporal variation analysis, but they are limited to be used because of high cloud cover ratio. In this paper, a 7-day rolling combination algorithm was presented to eliminate cloud obscuration, and the whole cloud amount falls below 7 %. The ground station in situ measurements verify that the overall precision is more than 90 %. The presented algorithm guaranteed the same spatial resolution and temporal resolution, and has higher precision than products MOD10A1 and MYD10A1. The MODIS 7-day rolling combination snow cover datasets products were obtained between 2003 and 2014 in the QTP, and the snow cover area of spatial and temporal variation was analyzed. The change characteristics of snow cover duration was also studied combining with the Digital Elevation Model data. Results show that the snow cover area of the whole QTP has a slowly decreased trend, but increases in autumn. Thus, the snow cover proportion of annual periodic and unstable in different elevations has the highest correlation with area of the elevation.