Space monitoring of snow cover of river watersheds

The automated geographical information system for monitoring of snow cover of river watersheds based on Terra data is developed for providing data for hydrological mathematical models of river runoff forecasts, in which an attempt to achieve best possible time resolution is undertaken. System is built on standard algorithms of snow and cloud classification and include new multiday data composition algorithm based on method of cumulative sums for detecting abrupt changes in a casual process, which makes possible to achieve 99% cloud free territory accumulation for a 16 days and unbiased assessment of moment of snow melting, despite of unavoidable presence of clouds in daily data. System is realized on client-server architecture with web-client and is already embedded together with forecast models in operational practice in 5 Administrations on hydrometeorology of Ural, Siberia and Far East.