Comparison of Methods to Estimate Snow Water Equivalent at the Mountain Range Scale: A Case Study of the California Sierra Nevada

Abstract

Abstract Despite the importance of snow in global water and energy budgets, estimates of global mountain snow water equivalent (SWE) are not well constrained. Two approaches for estimating total range-wide SWE over Sierra Nevada, California, are assessed: 1) global/hemispherical models and remote sensing and models available for continental United States (CONUS) plus southern Canada (CONUS+) available to the scientific community and 2) regional climate model simulations via the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model run at 3, 9, and 27 km. As no truth dataset provides total mountain range SWE, these two approaches are compared to a “reference” SWE consisting of three published, independent datasets that utilize/validate against in situ SWE measurements. Model outputs are compared with the reference datasets for three water years: 2005 (high snow accumulation), 2009 (average), and 2014 (low). There is a distinctive difference between the reference/WRF datasets and the global/CONUS+ daily estimates of SWE, with the former suggesting up to an order of magnitude more snow. Results are qualitatively similar for peak SWE and 1 April SWE for all three years. Analysis of SWE time series indicates that lower SWE for global and CONUS+ datasets is likely due to precipitation, rain/snow partitioning, and ablation parameterization differences. It is found that WRF produces reasonable (within 50%) estimates of total mountain range SWE in the Sierra Nevada, while the global and CONUS+ datasets underestimate SWE.