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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-2026-5345</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Assessing the use of satellite products from multispectral unmixing and differential interferometry for Altay snow water equivalent estimation</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Fang</surname>
<given-names>Yiwen</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0173-9515</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pan</surname>
<given-names>Jinmei</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2726-771X</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Margulis</surname>
<given-names>Steven A.</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>Zhou</surname>
<given-names>Jingtian</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8955-4506</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Sun</surname>
<given-names>Haorui</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>Lei</surname>
<given-names>Yang</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8377-1980</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>Xiong</surname>
<given-names>Chuan</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9164-4810</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>Wang</surname>
<given-names>Hua</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Tan</surname>
<given-names>Shurun</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff6">
<sup>6</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff7">
<sup>7</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff8">
<sup>8</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Institute, Zhejiang University, Haining, Zhejiang 314400, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan 611756, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>International Business School, Zhejiang University, Haining, Zhejiang 314400, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff6">
<label>6</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Extreme Photonics and Instrumentation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310027, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff7">
<label>7</label>
<addr-line>Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Electromagnetic Control and Advanced Electronic Integration, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310027, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff8">
<label>8</label>
<addr-line>College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310027, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>23</day>
<month>09</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>30</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Yiwen Fang 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-2026-5345/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5345/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5345/egusphere-2026-5345.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5345/egusphere-2026-5345.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>This work evaluates the application of fractional snow covered area (fSCA) derived from Harmonized Landsat Sentinel (HLS) multi-spectral images and snow products derived from Sentinel-1 and LuTan-1 interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) pairs, in generating snow water equivalent (SWE) at the Kelan watershed in Altay, northwestern China. The newly retrieved HLS fSCA is first assimilated using a previously-developed snow reanalysis framework to generate daily SWE estimates at a spatial resolution of ~ 150 m over Water Years (WYs) 2018 &amp;ndash; 2025. The snow reanalysis dataset is verified against an in situ SWE site, in situ snow depth sites and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Lidar swaths. The 8-year average peak SWE volume estimated from the fSCA constrained dataset is ~ 0.76 km&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, 35% of which is distributed at elevations above 1500 m. Based on the snow reanalysis dataset, SWE increases by more than 0.02-0.03 m (corresponding to a 2&amp;pi; wrapping cycle in C band) over a 12-day period at over ~20% of the pixel-time samples in most of the years, likely to be affected by phase wrapping in C-band InSAR retrievals. The likelihood is significantly reduced for L-band retrievals over a 12-day measurement period. Residual phase ambiguity remains in the Sentinel-1 &amp;Delta;SWE retrievals, with more than 10% of observations requiring at least one 2&amp;pi; cycle to match the reanalysis reference. Verification at the in situ site shows that even a single &amp;Delta;SWE retrieval affected by phase wrapping can reduce the accuracy of SWE estimates using the current snow reanalysis framework. After resolving the phase wrapping in Sentinel-1 &amp;Delta;SWE retrievals at the in situ SWE site, SWE generated from adjusted &amp;Delta;SWE assimilation shows comparable performance to SWE from HLS fSCA assimilation in WYs 2020 and 2021. In WY 2024, however, LuTan-1 &amp;Delta;SWE assimilation yields a higher unbiased root mean square difference despite negligible phase-wrapping issues, because &amp;Delta;SWE retrievals are only available on low-accumulation days. The overall limited effectiveness of InSAR &amp;Delta;SWE assimilation may be partly related to the scarcity of high-quality InSAR observations compared to fSCA observations, Sentinel-1&amp;rsquo;s relatively long revisit interval, and a data-assimilation approach not ideally suited to &amp;Delta;SWE observations. Future work should develop assimilation methods that explicitly account for phase-cycle uncertainty, allowing a more rigorous assessment of how well C-band retrievals constrain modeled SWE. Assimilation performance should also be evaluated with high-quality retrievals from upcoming low-frequency (L- and P-band) InSAR missions.</p>
</abstract>
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<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Key Research and Development Program of China</funding-source>
<award-id>2022YFB3903300,</award-id>
<award-id>2022YFB3903303</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>42601582</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
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