A Microwave Frequency Range Experiment for the Measurement of Snow Density and Liquid Water Content

Abstract

This article presents a new nondestructive characterization system for the extraction of both snow density and liquid water content (LWC). The experiment primarily measures the relative complex permittivity of snow ($\overline {{{\boldsymbol{\varepsilon }}_{\boldsymbol{s}}}} $) at microwave frequencies at 4–6 GHz. The density and LWC are then deduced with high accuracy from an empirical model of the literature that has been experimentally validated in this study.

Keywords

• Complex permittivity
• density
• high-frequency characterization
• liquid water content (LWC)
• snow
• snowpack