Combining Terrestrial Photography and Sentinel-1 Imagery for Assessing Wet Snow Dynamics in Ephemeral Snowpack over Semiarid Mountain Areas

Snowmelt dynamics in Mediterranean mountains differs from the ones found in higher latitudes. This work assesses wet snow dynamics in semiarid environments combining proxy and remote sensing databases over a pilot area in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range (southern Spain). A linear relationship was found between the minimum backscattering signal and the maximum snow depth achieved within a melting cycle. The slope of this relationship depends on the maximum snow depth reached and is linked to the contribution of the ground to the backscattering signal. These results delve into the understanding of wet-snow dynamics in Mediterranean mountains and can constitute the basis for an easy tool to compute maximum snowpack depth from the Sentinel 1 backscattering signal in these environments.