A Spatially‐Distributed Machine Learning Approach for Fractional Snow Covered Area Estimation

Abstract Snowpack in mountainous areas often provides water storage for summer and fall, especially in the Western United States. In situ observations of snow properties in mountainous terrain are limited by cost and effort, impacting both temporal and spatial sampling, while remote sensing estimates provide more complete spacetime coverage. Spatial estimates of fractional snow covered area (fSCA) at 30m are available every 16 days from the series of multispectral scanning instruments on Landsat platforms. Daily estimates at 463m spatial resolution are also available from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on the Terra satellite. Fusing Landsat and MODIS fSCA images creates high resolution daily spatial estimates of fSCA that are needed for various uses: to support scientists and managers interested in energy and water budgets for water resources and to understand the movement of animals in a changing climate. Here, we propose a new machine learning approach conditioned on MODIS fSCA, as well as a set of physiographic features, and fit to Landsat fSCA over a portion of the Sierra Nevada USA. The predictions are daily 30m fSCA. The approach relies on two stages of spatially‐varying models. The first classifies fSCA into three categories and the second yields estimates within (0, 100) percent fSCA. Separate models are applied and fitted within sub‐regions of the study domain. Compared with a recently‐published machine learning model (Rittger, Krock, et al., 2021), this approach uses spatially local (rather than global) random forests, and improves the classification error of fSCA by 16%, and fractionally‐covered pixel estimates by 18%.