Snow cover is an important variable in both climatological and hydrological studies because of its relationship to environmental energy and mass flux. However, variability in snow cover can confound satellite-based efforts to monitor vegetation phenology.
This research explores the utility of the PhenoCam network cameras to estimate Fractional Snow Cover (FSC) in grassland. The goal is to operationalize FSC estimates from PhenoCams to inform and improve satellite-based determination of phenological metrics.
The study site is the Oakville Prairie Biological Field Station, located near Grand Forks, North Dakota. I developed a mostly semi-automated process to estimate FSC from PhenoCam images through Python coding. Compared with previous research, which make use of RGB images only, the use of the monochrome RGB + NIR (near-infrared) channel reduced pixel misclassification and increased accuracy. The results have an average RMSE of 7.67 compared to visual estimates. This is a promising outcome, although not every PhenoCam system has NIR capability.