Determination of snow covered area using RADARSAT imagery on two small test sites in southern Ontario

This study was perfomed in order to determine if the areal extent of a wet discontinuous snowcover could beeffectively mapped using a RADARSAT image. The sites chosen for the experiment were two agricultural areaslocated in soudiern Ontario. On March 27, 1997 oblique arial photography was acquired and used to create aground reference map for two sites, showing the location of bare ground and snowcovered ground in selectedfields. On March 26, 1997 a RADARSAT C-HH SAR image was acquired, which was classified into bare groundand snowcovered ground and then compared to the ground reference map. The classification accuracies were62.3% and 67.3% for the sites, however the percent snowcovered area was calculated to be within 5% of theground reference map estimate after accounting for the melt that occurred in the day between the acquisition of thetwo images.