Articles | Volume 18, issue 7
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-3277-2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-3277-2024
Research article
 | 
23 Jul 2024
Research article |  | 23 Jul 2024

Measuring prairie snow water equivalent with combined UAV-borne gamma spectrometry and lidar

Phillip Harder, Warren D. Helgason, and John W. Pomeroy

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Status: closed

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Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload
ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (25 Mar 2024) by Edward Bair
AR by Phillip Harder on behalf of the Authors (13 Apr 2024)  Author's response   Author's tracked changes   Manuscript 
ED: Publish as is (24 Apr 2024) by Edward Bair
AR by Phillip Harder on behalf of the Authors (04 May 2024)
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Short summary
Remote sensing the amount of water in snow (SWE) at high spatial resolutions is an unresolved challenge. In this work, we tested a drone-mounted passive gamma spectrometer to quantify SWE. We found that the gamma observations could resolve the average and spatial variability of SWE down to 22.5 m resolutions. Further, by combining drone gamma SWE and lidar snow depth we could estimate SWE at sub-metre resolutions which is a new opportunity to improve the measurement of shallow snowpacks.