A forest zone extending from west to east of Tianshan Mountain greatly affects the snow mapping accuracy in this area. The ability of the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer （MISR） to obtain simultaneous measurements at nine view angles has provided unique information of forest. In this paper

we provided a new method to retrieve snow information in coniferous forest of Tianshan Mountain from MISR data. First

we chose 10 MISR scenes ranging from April 2000 to July 2001

and then ISODATA unsupervised classification was applied to the reflectance image viewed at five different view angles （0°

±26.1°

±45.6°） in red band acquired in summer to get the forest-region information. According to the angular signature of two study sites under certain conditions of snow distribution

we found that

when there was snow in the forest

the average of f ive view angles of red band was bigger than 0.1 or the reflectance viewed at 45.6° was 2.5 times more than the reflectance viewed at nadir. Results indicate that directional effects are associated with the snow conditions in the forest

especially in the red band

and the surface anisotropy signature has signif icant potential in retrieving snow information in forest regions.