A dynamic snowpack model for radiobrightness calculations driven by land-atmosphere energy and moisture fluxes

Presents a Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Transfer (SVAT) model for snow and soil designed to make the link between microwave radiometric emission from a snow covered terrain and the fluxes of energy and moisture across the land-atmosphere boundary. Flux measurements from the authors' first Radiobrightness Energy Balance Experiment (REBEX-1) drive the simulation of accumulation, melting, ablation, and the snow/soil temperature regime. The model simulates metamorphic state-including grain size-in each layer of a horizontally stratified snowpack. They compare the modeled snowpack to REBEX-1 observations and discuss the implications for radiobrightness calculations.