# Learning Regional Snow Water Equivalent and Snow Height Variations from Sentinel-1 InSAR Acquisitions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34614 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34614/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Managing water resources in mountainous regions depends heavily on reliable Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) and Snow Height (HS) data, yet these variables remain difficult to track at scale. This study evaluates three machine learning architectures (XGBoost, U-Net and SegFormer) for the joint estimation of SWE and HS variations from Sentinel-1 InSAR data over the Italian Alps, using the IT-SNOW reanalysis as reference. SegFormer achieves the best results on both targets, with an MAE of 10.391 cm for HS and 27.113 mm w.e. for SWE and the lowest variability across initializations. A feature sensitivity analysis shows that including all available features does not guarantee the lowest error, with model- and task-specific sensitivities. Spatial metrics (R2, Pearson's r) separate the three architectures far more clearly than mean error (MAE, RMSE) does, and decomposing the error per window attributes most of it to a systematic offset in the estimated mean variation rather than to the spatial pattern.