| Summary: | Previous studies have investigated the synergies betweensnow process models and passive microwave (PMW) remotesensing to fill the lack of information in the PMW obser-vations to retrieve the snow properties, especially the snowmass. We present a case study that expands the previouswork, performed in a tower setting, to a satellite case. Weuse a state-of-the-art snow process model with high spatialresolution, to produce a time series of snow states over astudy area in the northern Finland, and we simulate the vertically polarized brightness temperature (BT) time series atthe frequencies 18.7 GHz and 36.5 GHz. We compare themodeled BTs against the satellite observations. We identifyfactors, on one hand, in the snow process modeling, andon the other hand, in the radiative transfer modeling, thatare responsible for the errors. We also analyze the effect ofspatial heterogeneity of the modeled snow properties on thecoarse resolution satellite observed BT and conclude that it does not play a significant role, possibly due to the relativelyhomogeneous snow properties in our study area.
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