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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-3833</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>SnowGalileo: A Pre-trained Earth Observation Transformer for Daily, 100 m Fractional Snow Cover Mapping</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Reil</surname>
<given-names>Marlena</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff11">
<sup>11</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Kaltenborn</surname>
<given-names>Julia</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff11">
<sup>11</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Allum</surname>
<given-names>Donovan J. M.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pelletier</surname>
<given-names>Francis</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Roessler</surname>
<given-names>Sebastian</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff10">
<sup>10</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Shrestha</surname>
<given-names>Samip</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2023-1847</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Lv</surname>
<given-names>Zhibang</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1476-8902</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Truckenbrodt</surname>
<given-names>John</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Schwaizer</surname>
<given-names>Gabriele</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2611-6696</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff8">
<sup>8</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Nagler</surname>
<given-names>Thomas</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1298-8469</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff8">
<sup>8</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pomeroy</surname>
<given-names>John W.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4782-7457</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Marsh</surname>
<given-names>Christopher B.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1372-4513</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff7">
<sup>7</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Montpetit</surname>
<given-names>Benoit</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4491-2971</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jonas</surname>
<given-names>Tobias</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff6">
<sup>6</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Tseng</surname>
<given-names>Gabriel</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff9">
<sup>9</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Rolnick</surname>
<given-names>David</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Dietz</surname>
<given-names>Andreas J.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5733-7136</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Baumhoer</surname>
<given-names>Celia A.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1339-2288</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Mila - Quebec AI Institute, Montreal, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>German Remote Sensing Data Center, Earth Observation Center, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Weßling, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Centre for Hydrology, University of Saskatchewan, Canmore, Alberta</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>Environmental Research and Modelling Directorate, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Gatineau, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff6">
<label>6</label>
<addr-line>WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Davos, Switzerland</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff7">
<label>7</label>
<addr-line>Climate Processes Section, Climate Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Saskatoon, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff8">
<label>8</label>
<addr-line>ENVEO, Innsbruck, Austria</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff9">
<label>9</label>
<addr-line>Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff10">
<label>10</label>
<addr-line>Bavarian Environment Agency</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff11">
<label>11</label>
<addr-line>These authors contributed equally to this work.</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>08</day>
<month>09</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>68</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Marlena Reil et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3833/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3833/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3833/egusphere-2026-3833.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3833/egusphere-2026-3833.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Mountain snow is an important component of the cryosphere that directly affects downstream livelihoods. Accurate monitoring of mountain snow is crucial, yet remains challenging due to complex topography and frequent cloud cover. Although combining data from multiple Earth Observation (EO) satellites can improve spatial and temporal coverage, extracting Fractional Snow Cover (FSC) from sensors with different spatial and temporal resolutions remains difficult. AI-based Earth foundation models can process diverse sensor inputs and have been successfully applied to various remote sensing tasks; however, they often lack snow-specific design considerations. This paper presents SnowGalileo, a pre-trained transformer model designed to integrate EO data to map snow-covered areas. We evaluated SnowGalileo&apos;s potential for generating daily, gap-free FSC maps at 100m resolution in mountainous regions. SnowGalileo combines one week of satellite time-series data from multiple sensors, including Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Landsat, Sentinel-3, MODIS, and VIIRS, with topographic, land cover, and meteorological information to predict FSC for a given day. The model was pre-trained using masked autoencoding and fine-tuned using labeled data from various mountain ranges across the Northern Hemisphere. In addition to clear-sky conditions, SnowGalileo is evaluated under a wider variety of conditions than was previously possible, including cloud cover and lack of high-resolution (~10&amp;ndash;30 m) satellite imagery. For the Canadian Rockies and the Swiss Alps, respectively, SnowGalileo achieves RMSEs of 0.099 and 0.124 on clear days, 0.144 and 0.209 on cloudy days, 0.185 and 0.262 on days without high-resolution imagery, and 0.200 and 0.299 on cloudy days without high-resolution imagery. SnowGalileo also consistently outperforms random forests, support vector regressors, and multi-layer perceptrons. While the current product is a proof of concept that has undergone limited validation across geographic regions, operates on 1km &amp;times; 1km tiles rather than full maps, and has restricted capabilities in challenging conditions, this approach could ultimately enable the continuous, gap-free operational generation of FSC time series for mountain regions worldwide.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="68"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>European Space Agency</funding-source>
<award-id>ESA AI4Science 4000143295/23/I-DT</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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