Abstract
The snowpack is important for water resources, tourism, ecology, and the global energy budget. Over the past century, we have gone from point measurements of snow water equivalent (SWE) to estimate spring and summer runoff volumes, to remote sensing of various snowpack properties at continuously finer spatial and temporal resolutions, to various complexities of snowpack and hydrological modeling, to the current fusion of field data with remote sensing and modeling, all to improve our estimates of the snowpack and the subsequent runoff. However, we are still limited by the uncertainty induced by scaling from point field measurements to the area represented by remote sensing and modeling. This paper uses several examples of fine-resolution sampling to issue a call to snow hydrologists and other earth scientists to collect more data, or at least to thoroughly evaluate their sampling strategy for collecting ground-truth measurements. Recommendations are provided for different approaches to have more representative sampling, when at all possible, to collect at least a few more samples or data points.
Highlights
Estimating the Amount of Snow in the PackAt the turn of the 20th century, James E
We continue to sample snowpack properties to forecast water resources in various parts of the world [2,3,4]. We use these snow data to understand hydrological processes [5], climate dynamics [6,7], and the impacts that snow has on ecosystems [8,9]
Especially in the context of climate variability and change, there is an urgent need for accurate estimates of snow distribution, especially for snow water equivalent (SWE) [11]
Summary
At the turn of the 20th century, James E. Present different methods to estimate SWE across a mountain range: spatial interpolation for station observations, remote sensing, numerical models, and combinations thereof. This combination is presented in a schematic by Sturm [12] and is the recommended way forward to understand what is occurring with the snowpack, especially at different scales [14]. The first example presents the differences between manual and remotely sensed snow depth measurements to illustrate that a direct comparison may not be useful. The discussion puts these examples into context and provides some sampling recommendations
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