A new approachs to estimating the albedo for snow-covered surfaces in the satellite UV method

Abstract

This paper describes a new method for estimating snow albedo for satellite retrieval of surface UV irradiance and daily UV doses over snow-covered terrains. The method is based on combining satellite and meteorological analysis data. The satellite data exploited in this work are the measured reflectivities of the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer/Nimbus 7 instrument that coincides with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ERA-15 reanalyzed meteorological data. We compared satellite-retrieved UV daily doses to the ground-based measurements of two Finnish and five Canadian sites. The comparison clearly showed that the new snow albedo approach improves the accuracy of the satellite-retrieved UV doses. Copyright 2003 by the American Geophysical Union.