Snow cover is an important resource of the earth. It is very useful for climate research

agriculture and water resources management to investigate and monitor the distribution of snow cover in a large area and river basins using remote sensing technology.In this paper

we discussed the feasibility and complexity of snow cover dynamic monitoring using meteorological satellite data

and described the theory

method and the data processing procedure of snow cover monitoring using the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer （AVHRR） data.We used two methods for snow cover monitoring

one is weekly （or ten days） data compositing and threshold testing for large area snow cover detection in order to reduce the effects of cloud and other atmospheric contamination

the other is an algorithm to used cloud-free data over local area of river basins. According to these

we have done a lot of the testing research work over China and several local areas such as Anyemaqen Shan area in the upper reaches of the yellow river. We found that AVHRR/HRPT data is very useful to do snow cover monitoring and to calculate the extent of snow cover. Although it can not be used to measure the snow depth directly

it can be used to estimate the snow cover area and the percent of snow cover. And also it can be used to monitor the changes of snow cover. Finally

we summarized the analysis of the results and snow cover monitoring in the future.