Snow-Covered Area (SCA)

A comparison of monthly anomalies in Northern Hemisphere SCA derived from two satellite data sets: the NOAA snow charts revised by D. Robinson that map snow cover from primarily visible-wavelength sensors like AVHRR and GOES, and passive microwave (PM) algorithms using SMMR and SSM/I EASE-Grid brightness temperatures. Since both data sets exhibit significant month-to-month autocorrelation, we have estimated monthly trends with an autoregressive lag-1 model (AR(1)), using the method described by Weatherhead et al. (1998).