MODIS-based analysis of snow distribution and change in Emin River basin, Xinjiang, China

Serious snowmelt flood happened in the north of Xinjiang in March each year and it brought serious effect to local people's life and national production. Researching on snow distribution and change can provide decision support for preventing flood and alleviating disaster, Meanwhile, accurate snow mapping on a drainage area and snow cover depletion curve can provide parameters for simulating snowmelt runoff. This paper introduced unmixed pixel method and extracting snow cover according to the elevation zone, analyzing snow change in each elevation zone from March 4th to 12th 2005 in Emin river basin, Xinjiang, China integrating MODIS data and GIS. In addition, this paper analyzed the reason of flood formation and making regression analysis of snow change with weather factor by stepwise regression. The result shows that the correlation between snow change and temperature, as well as precipitation is high in 400-900m elevation zone (r = 0.9).