SNOW DEPTH ESTIMATION USING TIME SERIES PASSIVE MICROWAVE IMAGERY VIA GENETICALLY SUPPORT VECTOR REGRESSION (CASE STUDY URMIA LAKE BASIN)

Abstract. Lake Urmia is one of the most important ecosystems of the country which is on the verge of elimination. Many factors contribute to this crisis among them is the precipitation, paly important roll. Precipitation has many forms one of them is in the form of snow. The snow on Sahand Mountain is one of the main and important sources of the Lake Urmia’s water. Snow Depth (SD) is vital parameters for estimating water balance for future year. In this regards, this study is focused on SD parameter using Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) instruments on board the Defence Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) F16. The usual statistical methods for retrieving SD include linear and non-linear ones. These methods used least square procedure to estimate SD model. Recently, kernel base methods widely used for modelling statistical problem. From these methods, the support vector regression (SVR) is achieved the high performance for modelling the statistical problem. Examination of the obtained data shows the existence of outlier in them. For omitting these outliers, wavelet denoising method is applied. After the omission of the outliers it is needed to select the optimum bands and parameters for SVR. To overcome these issues, feature selection methods have shown a direct effect on improving the regression performance. We used genetic algorithm (GA) for selecting suitable features of the SSMI bands in order to estimate SD model. The results for the training and testing data in Sahand mountain is [R²_TEST=0.9049 and RMSE= 6.9654] that show the high SVR performance.