Multi-Spectral Analysis of Dry Alpine Seasonal Snowpack

Seasonal Alpine snowpack is an important reservoir of fresh water useful for human and agricultural purposes and for hydroelectric power generation. Thus, monitoring the evolution of the snow is very useful to control this important factor. To do this, different approaches are used. Among them, microwave-based devices are used, but show some limitations due to the impossibility to retrieve the parameters without a priori assumptions or complementary information about the snowpack, or complex data processing. This paper present a portable radar architecture able to overcome this limitation by using a dual-receiver system. The device was already tested for the S-band. Now, a multi-spectral analysis is tested for the first time to retrieve values of depth, density and snow water equivalent (SWE), for dry snow. The system was tested in real field sites in the Italian Alps during late winter 2022. The overall results were in good agreement with manual measurements.