Trends in Northern Hemispheric Snow Presence

TL;DR

This study introduces a statistical model to analyze satellite data on snow presence, revealing significant regional trends in snow cover changes across the Northern Hemisphere from 1967 to 2021.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel two-state Markov chain model with periodic dynamics for analyzing snow presence trends in satellite data.

Findings

Snow presence declining in nearly twice as many grids as it is increasing.

Arctic and southern latitudes show rapid snow cover recession.

Eastern Canada exhibits increasing snow cover.

Abstract

This paper develops a mathematical model and statistical methods to quantify trends in presence/absence observations of snow cover (not depths) and applies these in an analysis of Northern Hemispheric observations extracted from satellite flyovers during 1967-2021. A two-state Markov chain model with periodic dynamics is introduced to analyze changes in the data in a grid by grid fashion. Trends, converted to the number of weeks of snow cover lost/gained per century, are estimated for each study grid. Uncertainty margins for these trends are developed from the model and used to assess the significance of the trend estimates. Grids with questionable data quality are identified. Among trustworthy grids, snow presence is seen to be declining in almost twice as many grids as it is advancing. While Arctic and southern latitude snow presence is found to be rapidly receding, other locations, such as Eastern Canada, are experiencing advancing snow cover.