Quantifying the impacts of snow on surface energy balance through assimilating snow cover fraction and snow depth

Abstract

Seasonal snow plays an important part in Earth’s climate system. Snow cover regulates the land surface energy balance through altering the albedo of the land surface. To utilize the satellite-retrieved snow cover fraction (SCF) and snow depth (SD) data sufficiently and avoid inconsistency, this paper developed a very simple but robust quality control method to assimilate Fengyun satellite-retrieved SCF and SD simultaneously. The results show that the assimilation method which this paper implemented can not only utilize the satellite-retrieved SCF and SD data sufficiently but also avoid the inconsistency of them. Two experiments were designed and performed to quantify the impacts of snow on land surface energy balance using the integrated urban land model. With the increase of the SCF and SD, the net radiation decreased significantly during the day and increased a little at night; the sensible heat flux decreased significantly during the day; the evapotranspiration and ground heat flux decreased during the day too.