Separating Snow from Signal: Quantifying Non-Snow Errors in InSAR SWE Retrievals

This study quantifies the theoretical impact of non-snow factors on Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) measurements of snow water equivalent (SWE). The elements considered are surface elevation changes, ionospheric advance, atmospheric delay, soil moisture variations, ice formation in vegetation, and decorrelation. The relationship between the SWE error and each independent variable is calculated directly or plotted over a typical range of values. This analysis provides the groundwork for either mitigating or quantifying error in future InSAR SWE retrievals.