Snow Water Equivalent Retrieval Using VV And VH Dual-Polarization SAR Data

Snow water equivalent (SWE) is a critical component in the global water and energy cycles. This study proposes a SWE inversion method applicable to VV and VH dual-polarization Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The method establishes a cost function between simulated and SAR-measured scattering and subsequently solves this function to obtain SWE values. Using the central region of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the United States as the study area, SWE was retrieved using five Sentinel-1 images acquired from January to February 2021. The verification results show the feasibility of the method, which will help expand the application of Sentinel-1 in snow monitoring.