Snowpack Monitoring Using a Dual-Receiver Radar Architecture

Risk mitigation strategies to reduce the impact of avalanches on infrastructures, such as evacuation of mountain villages, and planned closure of roads, railways and ski resorts, are heavily dependent on avalanche forecasting capability. Moreover, the possibility to determine the snow water equivalent (SWE) of a snowpack is a crucial step for water management strategies used, for example, in agriculture and hydroelectric power plants. In both cases, for dry snow, two key physical parameters are the total snow thickness and the wave speed in the medium. Microwave radars are being used to monitor snowpacks, but they invariably invoke external aids or a priori assumptions to calculate these physical parameters. This paper presents an innovative radar architecture for snowpack monitoring, of a single emitting and two receiving antennas. This novel configuration enables simultaneous identification of both total snow thickness and wave speed in the medium without any additional hypothesis or device. For dry snow, consequently, snow density and SWE can also be immediately determined. The proposed architecture is validated using first numerical simulations and then indoor and outdoor experimental results. These latter achieved accuracy levels better than 10% for total snow thickness and better than 13% for wave speed.