The Effect of Snow on Boreal Forest Albedo

A set of high resolution photos of Sub-Arctic forests with snowcovered forest floorwas analyzed by unsupervised classification to demonstrate the effect of the canopy on the reflectance of the snowpixels. The mean reflectance of snowpixels decreased linearly with increasing number of canopy pixels, similarly for cloudy and clear sky images. An albedomodel was used to estimate the contribution of multiple scattering from the forest floorto its total scattering. The multiple scattering dominates the NIR and broadband albedoand is not negligible in the red wavelength range for leaf area index(LAI) values exceeding 1…2, depending on the sun zenithangle.