Mapping of Moist Snow and Percolation Zones Through Sentinel-2

Abstract

The purpose of this work consists of an application of remote sensing indices such as NDSI and NDSW and geoprocessing analyzes to map an occurrence of water, percolation and moist snow zones, as well as an identification of the characteristic altitudes of each snow zone mapped in the Dundee Island located on the Antarctic Peninsula. For this, a Sentinel-2 image representative of an ablation period corresponding to the end of summer of 2016 was used. As a result an interaction between the NDSI and NDSW indexes allowed a distinction and delimitation of the different zones of snow. As geoprocessing analyzes that involved an overlapping of the land cover classification from the indices, with the altimetric data from the Digital Elevation Model ASTER GDEM, allowed an identification of some bands altimetry characteristic of each zoning. Data base analysis was identified with 17.87% of the total area of the island for the class of moist snow and 81.15% as zone of snow in percolation. However, these results prove the effectiveness of the methodology used based on images of the MSI sensor of the Sentinel-2 satellite in the mapping of the several snow areas in the study area, bringing together geoprocessing tools.

Keywords

• NDSI
• NDWS
• Moist snow
• Percolation snow
• Sentinel-2