**4. Discussion**

To ge<sup>t</sup> the spatial distribution of snow resources for winter tourism assessment, remote sensing data were used to calculate snow depth. Snowfall data from meteorological stations were used to verify the accuracy of snow depth obtained from remote sensing data in space. The spatial location of winter tourism scenic spots and skiing areas in Jilin province verifies the assessment results.

### *4.1. Spatial Snow DEPTH verification*

According to the data from meteorological stations, snowfall is increasing gradually from west to east in Jilin province from the boxplot (Figure 8).

The trend obtained from two data sources is identical in the study area. From the variety of snowfall, there is little difference in depth in western Jilin Province, but the snow depth varies greatly in eastern Jilin Province. The reasons are that the western Jilin Province belongs to the arid area, the annual snowfall in this area are 29.3–40 mm in the winter, while this area belongs to a plain area with little snow cover. For the eastern region, this area belongs to a humid area with diverse land use and complex topography, which forms several local microclimates. This area has the abundant precipitation (100–190 mm) in the winter. With the monsoon and the topography, this caused a grea<sup>t</sup> change in the winter snow depth.

**Figure 8.** The snowfall from weather stations in the study area.

A total of 186 snowfall records from 1980 to 2014 in six meteorological stations were selected to verify the snow depth results. Based on the ascending observational data of meteorological stations, the tendencies of snow depth in the two sources are consistent in spatial distribution (Figure 9), but there is a certain difference. This is because meteorological observation data mainly record one snowfall, and the snow depth from remote sensing data may be multiple-snowfalls in the same space. Therefore, there will be a certain gap between the two data sources.

**Figure 9.** Comparing the two sources of snow resources data.
