Assessment of MODIS-Based Fractional Snow Cover Products Over the Tibetan Plateau

The snow cover distribution is crucial to Earth's climate and hydrological systems. Snow cover maps from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) are widely utilized in climate research and water-source management. Three MODIS-derived fractional snow cover (FSC) products, namely, MOD10A1 version 6, MODSCAG, and MODAGE, are assessed to evaluate the accuracy of FSC data over the Tibetan Plateau from May 2013 to April 2015. A Landsat-8/ Operational Land Imager (OLI) snow map that is based on linear spectral mixture analysis is regarded as the “reference dataset.” A total of 149 OLI images that span the Tibetan Plateau are used. The performance of these three datasets is compared to the “reference dataset” by using binary and fractional metrics over forest, grass, and bare soil, and in the Himalaya region. The binary classification assessment reveals that larger local illumination angles and vegetation coverage at the snow boundaries resulted in omission errors in MOD10A1, and snow patchiness caused this model to miss snow. MODSCAG correctly identified snow pixels, but overestimated snow at the snow boundaries and at local illumination angles that exceeded 30°. MODAGE precisely recognized snow-free areas, but underestimated snow coverage because of snow patchiness. MODSCAG and MODAGE produced smaller root mean square errors (RMSE) than MOD10A1, likely because spectral mixture analysis is superior to the normalized difference snow index-based empirical method. The behaviors of these products differed at various spatial scales. The RMSE significantly declined with decreasing spatial resolution from 500 m to 2 km. However, when aggregated to 5 km, the RMSE increased because fewer pixels were involved in the calculation.