Linking Sentinel-1 to a Coupled Radiative Transfer Model: A Spatio-Temporal Modeling Analysis over the Alps

To better understand the interactions of satellite C-band radar with the soil-snow-vegetation continuum in a spatio-temporal context and to provide a novel approach for snow depth retrieval from Sentinel-1 observations, a coupled radiative transfer model was developed. This model combines a snow, soil and vegetation radiative transfer model to simulate the Sentinel-1 observations over the Alps, and can be inversed to obtain estimates of snow depth. Performance will be assessed at 1 km spatial resolution for the winter of 2017-2018, across a wide range of elevations, local incidence angles and total accumulated snow, using several performance measures (Pearson correlation and MAE).