The cold regions hydrological model (CRHM) platform, a physically based hydrological model using a modular and object-oriented structure, has been applied for simulating the redistribution of snow by wind, snowmelt, infiltration, evapo-transpiration, soil moisture balance, surface depression storage and run-off routing. Land use and land cover classification is a preprocessing procedure to provide the required parameters for CRHM. Per-pixel-based and object-oriented classifications are the two major classification approaches currently in practice.