Using new, daily cloud-free snow-cover products, this study examines snow cover dynamics and their response to climate change. The results demonstrate that the daily cloud-free snow-cover products not only posses the advantages of the AMSR-E (unaffected by weather conditions) and MODIS (relatively higher resolution) products, but are also characterized by high snow and overall classification accuracies (~85% and ~98%, respectively), substantially greater than those of the existing daily snow-cover products for all sky conditions and very similar to, or even slightly greater than, those of the daily MODIS products for clear-sky conditions. Using the snow-cover products, we analyzed the snow cover dynamics over the Tibetan Plateau and determined that the maximum number of snow-covered days (SCD) in a year followed a decreasing tendency from 2003 to 2010, with a decrease in snow-covered area (SCA) equivalent to 55.3% of the total Tibetan Plateau area. There is also a slightly increasing tendency in the maximum snow cover area (SCA), and a slightly decreasing tendency in the persistent snow cover area (i.e., pixels of SCD > 350 days) was observed for the 8-year period, which was characterized by increases in temperature (0.09 °C/year) and in precipitation (0.26 mm/year). This suggests that, on the Tibetan Plateau, changes in temperature and precipitation exert a considerable influence on the regional SCD and SCA, as well as the distribution of persistent snow cover.

The use of aircraft for cloud seeding to enhance rainfall serves as an effective meteorological intervention and plays a vital role in ensuring ecological security within the context of the low-altitude economy. This study utilized ground-based precipitation observations from the Shiyang River Basin, in conjunction with Landsat satellite remote sensing imagery (2000–2024), regional historical regression, vegetation index retrieval, and spectral mixture analysis, to evaluate the effectiveness of aircraft-based cloud seeding for enhancing rainfall. The normalized difference vegetation index and the fraction of vegetation cover were calculated to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics and growth patterns of surface vegetation before and after the implementation of this rainfall enhancement measure, thus offering a quantitative assessment of the ecological restoration effect in the Shiyang River Basin. A novel application of cloud-seeding technology for ecological recovery has been developed. It provides one of the first quantitative assessments of aircraft-based cloud seeding in inland river basins of China, linking meteorological intervention directly to measurable ecological restoration outcomes. The findings indicate that: (1) Aircraft-based cloud seeding for rainfall enhancement has yielded significant results, with an average relative precipitation increase of 20.8% (p < 0.1%) in the operational area; (2) Following the commencement of this rainfall enhancement practice in 2010, normalized difference vegetation index and fraction of vegetation cover values within the study area have shown a marked increase, with the percentage of regions with low vegetation coverage declining from 30.36% to 25.21%; and (3) Since the implementation of this measure in 2010, vegetation conditions in the Shiyang River Basin have generally stabilized, demonstrating substantial improvement and a reduction in degradation. The percentage of regions classified as improved or slightly improved increased significantly, from 14.20% before the implementation of this measure to 36.24%, indicating a transition in the vegetation ecosystem from localized enhancement to overall improvement. These results demonstrate that ecological restoration efforts in the Shiyang River Basin have shown considerable improvement after the introduction of aircraft-based cloud-seeding operations, resulting in significant increases in vegetation coverage throughout extensive regions of the basin. The research connects scientific results to policy and management, suggesting that low-altitude economy-based cloud seeding can play a key role in water resource management, ecological stability, and climate resilience.