Towards a webcam-based snow cover monitoring network: methodology and evaluation

• Published in: The Cryosphere
• Main Authors: C. Portenier, F. Hüsler, S. Härer, S. Wunderle
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2020
• Subjects: Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Geology; QE1-996.5; Principal Point; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-1409-2020; https://doaj.org/article/803763dd21344b3aa1e65a2d070db04d

Snow cover variability has a significant impact on climate and the environment and is of great socioeconomic importance for the European Alps. Terrestrial photography offers a high potential to monitor snow cover variability, but its application is often limited to small catchment scales. Here, we present a semiautomatic procedure to derive snow cover maps from publicly available webcam images in the Swiss Alps and propose a procedure for the georectification and snow classification of such images. In order to avoid the effort of manually setting ground control points (GCPs) for each webcam, we implement a novel registration approach that automatically resolves camera parameters (camera orientation; principal point; field of view, FOV) by using an estimate of the webcams' positions and a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM). Furthermore, we propose an automatic image-to-image alignment to correct small changes in camera orientation and compare and analyze two recent snow classification methods. The resulting snow cover maps indicate whether a DEM grid is snow-covered, snow-free, or not visible from webcams' positions. GCPs are used to evaluate our novel automatic image registration approach. The evaluation reveals a root mean square error (RMSE) of 14.1 m for standard lens webcams ( FOV<48 ∘ ) and a RMSE of 36.3 m for wide-angle lens webcams ( FOV≥48 ∘ ). In addition, we discuss projection uncertainties caused by the mapping of low-resolution webcam images onto the high-resolution DEM. Overall, our results highlight the potential of our method to build up a webcam-based snow cover monitoring network.