A new approach to estimating the albedo for snow‐covered surfaces in the satellite UV method

Abstract

This paper describes a new method for estimating snow albedo for satellite retrieval of surface UV irradiance and daily UV doses over snow‐covered terrains. The method is based on combining satellite and meteorological analysis data. The satellite data exploited in this work are the measured reflectivities of the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer/Nimbus 7 instrument that coincides with the European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts ERA‐15 reanalyzed meteorological data. We compared satellite‐retrieved UV daily doses to the ground‐based measurements of two Finnish and five Canadian sites. The comparison clearly showed that the new snow albedo approach improves the accuracy of the satellite‐retrieved UV doses.