Analysis of snow surface dynamics in the Darwin mountain through satellite images optical and its relationship with data climate (2004–2016)

The characterization of snow surface is essential to understand the Cryosphere dynamics of the Southern Patagonia of Chile. It becomes more important when we consider that is an area of difficult access due to its geography and extreme climatic conditions. Through the processing of orbitals images from sensors TM and OLI/TIRS, present on LANDSAT 5 and 8, respectively, and their subsequent classification by an algorithm of Maximum Likelihood Supervised Classification (CSMV) and an application of the threshold to Normalized-Difference Snow Index (NDSI), were obtained for each category binary maps with classes 1 (snow) and 0 (not snow). Images were vectorized and then areas corresponding to the snow cover, in square kilometers (ki 2), were calculated. The variation of snow cover was correlated to precipitation and temperature data (reanalysis II NCEP/NCAR) and with Oceanic Niño Index and Antarctic Oscillation Index. The variation of snow cover indicates a decline over the study period (June 2004 to June 2016), what could be associated with global warming or remote influence, for example, ENSO and Antarctic Oscillation. But there is no homogeneous pattern of cause and consequence between snow cover variations and remote phenomenon's occurrence.