Identification of Seasonal Snow-covered Seasons of Iran based on MODIS Data

In this paper daily MODIS Terra and MODIS Aqua data were applied to calculate seasonal clustering of snow-covered days in Iran. These data are available in 500 * 500 meters. The applied data in this study are the finest available data for MODIS products. As the first step, numerical snow data were collected in Matlab software and then some algorithms were exploited to reduce cloud cover. After preparation of data the mean matrix of solar months from Farvardin to Esfand was prepared in Matlab. The dimension of the Matrix was 12 * 7541502 that rows represent each month and the columns depict spatial pixels. In the second step, the Euclidean distance was then calculated using ward method in Matlab. The findings of this study indicated that there are four snow-covered seasons in Iran. No snow season includes the months of Ordibehesht to Khordad, the transient months that are Farvardin and Aban, the shell of snow-covered season includes the months of Azar and Esfand. And the core of snow-covered season that incorporates the months of Dey and Bahman. And we also calculated for each of the climate season and each of solar months the number of snow-covered days and their areas in Iran. Investigations revealed that the highest area of one day snow-covered day is in the month of Dey. In this month the extent of one day snow-covered days covers 15 percent of the country. In the last step, the relation between snow-covered days and altitude was explored using Iran’s Digital Elevation Model. The results confirmed that in each of season this relation is different.