GLOBAL ANALYSIS OF SNOW COVER CHANGES USING GOOGLE EARTH ENGINE AND MODIS DATA PRODUCTS

The “big data” approach to remote sensing continues to be a major field of growth across the environmental disciplines. Planetary-Scale geospatial analysis in particular has taken on a new significance as data series from orbital satellites have improved not only on the resolution and breadth of the data they generate, but also in the length of contiguous records. Significant analysis of these data is hindered by several hurdles, including, but not limited to, acquisition and format of the data, the integrity and quality of the data, and the computational power needed to perform analyses on these data. Google has developed a platform called Google Earth Engine (GEE), which stores and serves these data to the user, and performs all the computations on their servers, rapidly accelerating the analysis process. Using this platform, global analyses of snow and ice coverage using daily MODIS snow cover products were performed across 10 hydrological years between October 2002 and 2012. Several trend analyses were performed to create maps including a linear fit trend and a Mann-Kendall trend analysis, and several other snow cover indices. As a case of mapping by analysis, these maps will be used to discern any trends in snow cover that might not have been previously visible. Research on this project is ongoing as we continue to refine both the underlying code and extend the capabilities of our analysis.