Dorothy Hall was awarded Life Member of the Eastern Snow Conference at the 79th meeting in Easton, PA, on June 7th. She also gave the banquet speech entitled “A Brief History of Advances in Satellite Snow-Cover Mapping”.
In this talk, Hall showed some highlights of the advances in satellite remote sensing of snow cover beginning with the launch of the TIROS-1 weather satellite in 1960, and continuing with the launch of the first Landsat satellite in 1972, which enabled basin-scale snow mapping every 18 days. Further improvements in basin-scale mapping have been made during the 51-year history of the Landsat program with improved spatial resolution and temporal frequency. The 1999 launch of the first MODIS on the Terra satellite heralded a new era of daily, global snow-cover mapping at 500-m spatial resolution, with continuation of the MODIS snow-cover record expected through at least the 2030s with NOAA VIIRS instruments on current and future satellites. The 57-year NOAA/Rutgers Northern Hemisphere Climate Data Record of snow-cover extent was highlighted for its pivotal role in showing increasingly earlier spring snowmelt resulting from climate warming. During this 63-year period, 1960 – 2023, the Eastern Snow Conference met every year except for 2020, and has published all of the proceedings volumes online. Hall showed highlights of many of these meetings, especially the 31 meetings she has attended since 1978.
Dorothy Hall is an ESSIC research scientist and a senior scientist in the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. There, she conducts research on the remote sensing of snow and ice.
