Development of a novel approach for snow wetness estimation using hybrid polarimetric RISAT-1 SAR datasets in North-Western Himalayan region

•This study proposes a novel methodology for the estimation of snow wetness utilizing the C-band hybrid polarimetric RISAT-1 SAR dataset.•The Estimation of Surface and Volume Dielectric Constant of Snowpack is done for the retrieval of Snowpack Wetness utilizing surface and volume scattering characteristics.•The modeled generalized surface and volume scattering parameter (α), and (γ), based on the X-Bragg’s reflection coefficients and Fresnel transmission coefficients, are used for the inversion of surface and volume snow permittivity respectively.•The proposed method using RISAT-1 dataset outperformed the estimates based on fully polarimetric RADARSAT-2 dataset utilizing the conventional Shi and Dozier method.•The developed methodology for snow wetness estimation will be applicable for the Hybrid Polarimetric mode datasets from upcoming missions like NISAR, ALOS-3, and Radar Constellation Mission (RCM).