Subgrid Variability of Snow Water Equivalent at Operational Snow Stations in the Western USA
HYDROLOGICAL PROCESSES Hydrol. Process. 27, 2383–2400 (2013) Published online 24 May 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/hyp.9355 Subgrid variability of snow water equivalent at operational snow stations in the western USA Leah Meromy,1* Noah P. Molotch,1,2 Timothy E. Link,3 Steven R. Fassnacht4 and Robert Rice5 1 Department of Geography, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA 2 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA 3 Department of Forest Ecology and Biogeosciences, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA 4 ESS – Watershed Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA 5 Sierra Nevada Research Institute, University of California at Merced, Merced, CA, USA Abstract: The spatial distribution of snow water equivalent (SWE) is a key variable in many regional-scale land surface models. Currently, the assimilation of point-scale snow sensor data into these models is commonly performed without consideration of the spatial representativeness of the point data with respect to the model grid-scale SWE. To improve the understanding of the relationship between point-scale snow measurements and surrounding areas, we characterized the spatial distribution of snow depth and SWE within 1-, 4- and 16-km2 grids surrounding 15 snow stations (snowpack telemetry and California snow sensors) in California, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon during the 2008 and 2009 snow seasons. More than 30 000 field observations of snowpack properties were used with binary regression tree models to relate SWE at the sensor site to the surrounding area SWE to evaluate the sensor representativeness of larger-scale conditions.
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