Automatic snow extent extraction in alpine environments: short and medium term 2000-2006 analysis

摘要

Water resources in Northern Italy has dramatically shortened in the past 10 to 20 years, and recent phenomena connected to the climate change have further sharpened the trend. To match the observable and collected information with this experience and find methodologies to improve the water management cycle in the Lombardy Region, University of Milan Bicocca, Fondazione Lombardia per l'Ambiente and ARPA Lombardia are currently funding a project, named "Regional Impact of Climatic Change in Lombardy Water Resources: Modelling and Applications" (RICLIC-WARM). In the framework of this project, the analysis of the fraction of water available and provided to the whole regional network by the snow cover of the Alps will be investigated by means of remotely sensed data. While there are already a number of algorithms devoted to this task for data coming from various and different sensors in the visible and infrared regions, no operative comparison and analytical analysis of the advantages and drawbacks of using different data has been attempted. This idea will pave the way for a fusion of the available information as well as a multi-source mapping procedure which will be able to exploit successfully the huge quantity of data available for the past and the even larger amount that may be accessed in the future. To this aim, a comparison on selected dates for the whole 2000/2006 period was performed.