Estimation of Snow Depth in the Hindu Kush Himalayas of Afghanistan during Peak Winter and Early Melt Season

Abstract

The Pamir ranges of the Hindu Kush regions in Afghanistan play a substantial role in regulating the water resources for the Middle Eastern countries. Particularly, the snowmelt runoff in the Khanabad watershed is one of the critical drivers for the Amu River, since it is a primary source of available water in several Middle Eastern countries in the off monsoon season. The purpose of this study is to devise strategies based on active microwave remote sensing for the monitoring of snow depth during the winter and the melt season. For the estimation of snow depth, we utilized a multi-temporal C-band (5.405 GHz) Sentinel-1 dual polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a differential interferometric SAR (DInSAR)-based framework. In the proposed approach, the estimated snowpack displacements in the vertical transmit-vertical receive (VV) and vertical transmit-horizonal receive (VH) channels were improved by incorporating modeled information of snow permittivity, and the scale was enhanced by utilizing snow depth information from the available ground stations. Two seasonal datasets were considered for the experiments corresponding to peak winter season (February 2019) and early melt season (March 2019). The results were validated with the available nearest field measurements. A good correlation determined by the coefficient of determination of 0.82 and 0.57, with root mean square errors of 2.33 and 1.44 m, for the peak winter and the early melt season, respectively, was observed between the snow depth estimates and the field measurements. Further, the snow depth estimates from the proposed approach were observed to be significantly better than the DInSAR displacements based on the correlation with respect to the field measurements.

Large scale water yield assessment for sparsely monitored river basins: A case study for Afghanistan

“…Afghanistan is a semi-arid country with high variability and irregularity in precipitation [9,18]. It receives most precipitation in the form of snow during winter and a smaller amount as rainfall in spring [12,20]. Spatial differences in precipitation are substantial and vary according to the altitude and location.…”

Quantification of Amu River Riverbank Erosion in Balkh Province of Afghanistan during 2004–2020

“…The headwaters are primarily monitored at Pyanj River and at other streams in the headwaters of the Vakhsh River (Figure 2). The Pyanj and Vakhsh Rivers receive water from snowmelt from most of the snow cover area in the watershed [36,37]. A maximum river discharge is typically observed in the spring and summer, contributed from the snowmelt, and, in fall, the river discharge reduces and comprises contributions from the glacier melts.…”

Snow Penetration Depth Inversion in Tibetan Plateau Based on Coherence Scattering Model with X-band Data

“…Snow is an important component of the cryosphere, with significant impacts on hydrology, climate, ecology, and human activities and livelihoods (Eppler and Rabus 2022;Patil et al 2020). The active remote sensing technique has a good application in obtaining the internal vertical structure of snow within extensive snow-covered areas, due to its advantages of penetrating ability to ground objects and large-scale observation (Mahmoodzada et al 2020). The penetration depth of microwaves in snow serves as a parameter for evaluating the vertical structure within the snowpack, thereby assisting in the quantitative estimation of snow accumulation.…”