ESA OPTION CCI+ SNOW

This project is an option of the European Space Agency (ESA) project CCI+ Phase 2 - New ECVs / Snow (ESA Climate Change Initiative on the essential climate variable snow) where Eurac Research is responsible for the validation activities. The option proposes to address new approaches for obtaining snow cover extent from high resolution imagery such as Sentinel-2 and Landsat. The details provided in such imagery need the development of innovative methodologies with the objective to improve the accuracy in the discrimination between cloud and snow, detection of snow in vegetated areas and in complex terrain. The improved maps at high resolution will result in better and qualified information for the validation of the ECV Snow obtained from medium resolution sensors such as MODIS, AVHRR and Sentinel-3, as indicated in the baseline project.

This project is developed in cooperation with ENVEO Austria. In particular, the role of the Institute for Earth Observation of Eurac Research is to lead the development of advanced machine learning algorithm for snow cover detection from high resolution images.  

Contact Persons: Carlo Marin, Claudia Notarnicola

carlo.marin@eurac.edu; claudia.notarnicola@eurac.edu