Daily cloud free snow cover mapping over Central Asia and Xinjiang Province of China

Central Asia and Xinjiang, China are conjunct areas, located in the hinterland of the Eurasian continent, where the snowfall is an important supplement water resource. The induced seasonal snow cover is vita factors to the regional energy and water balance, remote sensing plays a key role in the snow mapping filed, while the daily remote sensing products are normally contaminated by the occurrence of cloud, that obviously obstacles the utility of snow cover mapping. In this paper, based on the daily snow product from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), a cloud removing method was developed by considering the regional snow distribution characteristics with latitude and altitude dependence respectively. In the end, the daily cloud free products was compared with the same period of eight days MODIS standard product, and validated with the help of the in-situ observations, revealing that the methodology are feasible with ∼ 91% Recall, ∼81% Precision and 85% Balanced F when snow depth is greater than 3cm. The cloud free snow products are kept as the same accuracy, recall and precision rate as the MODIS source products, while could provide higher temporal resolution, and more details over Center Asia and Xinjiang Province of China.