PERFORMANCE OF COMS SNOW AND SEA ICE DETECTION ALGORITHM

The purpose of this study is to develop snow and sea ice detection algorithm in Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) meteorological data processing system. Since COMS has only five channels, it is not affordable to use microwave or shortwave infrared data which are effective and generally used for snow detection. In order to estimate snow and sea ice coverage, combinations between available channel data(mostly visible and 3.7 ${\mu}m$) are applied to the algorithm based on threshold method. As a result, the COMS snow and sea ice detection algorithm shows reliable performance compared to MODIS products with channel limitation. Specifically, there is partial underestimation over the complicated vegetation area and overestimation over the area of high level clouds such as cirrus. Some corrections are performed by using water vapor and infrared channels to remove cloud contamination and by applying NDVI to detect more snow pixels for the underestimated area.