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

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 p...

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Bibliographic Details
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:
geo
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-1409-2020
https://www.the-cryosphere.net/14/1409/2020/tc-14-1409-2020.pdf
https://doaj.org/article/803763dd21344b3aa1e65a2d070db04d
Description
Summary: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.