Many of the systems in the
world, including man-made systems and ecological
systems, depend on snow and snowmelt.
So as the climate is changing it is important
to understand how these dependencies are also
changing and this study help address some
of those problems and issues in Alaska.
With Alaska warming twice
as fast as the rest of the US we are seeing other impacts in Alaska, such as thawing
permafrost, receding glaciers, as well
as a lengthening of the wildfire season and
increase in the number of wildfires, which
has impacts on local environments.
The Alaska Interagency Coordination
Center, or AICC, is responsible for providing
decision support information to wildland fire
managers around the state of Alaska.
One of our main tools is the Fire Weather
Index System, which provides a number of codes
and indices used to monitor and predict fuel
conditions and fire danger based on changes
in the weather.
These indicators are started three days after
an area goes snow free.
A web-based tool that runs these
indices currently relies on historical averages
to start calculations on gridded map backgrounds,
while individual station start dates are determined
by direct observation, which often requires
costly snow survey flights for more remote
areas as snow survey stations are few and
far between around this large state.
The NASA DEVELOP team, at the National Centers
for Environmental Information, in North Carolina,
worked for 10 weeks on fulfilling the following
objectives:
One, utilize both NASA Earth observations
and NOAA climate data to fill existing snowmelt
data gaps in Alaska.
Two, create a snow melt cover tool to calculate
the changes
in near real-time using MODIS data.
Three, distribute raw gridded snowmelt data
to project partners for use within existing
mapping services.
The Aqua MODIS and Suomi NPP VIIRS satellites
were used to create the SnoCoM tool.
This tool performs a change detection analysis
indicating when and where areas are snow-free
for three consecutive days.
Its final outputs are a user-friendly map
which displays snow-free zones and slightly
processed snow cover melt data for the end-users
to incorporate in the Alaska Fire & Fuels
online mapping tool.
This new tool will provide near
real-time snow free information for the entire
state, thus improving the quality of our fuels
and fire danger forecasts and ensuring that
fire managers have state of the art decision
tools in their hands.
