Abstract
Abstract. Accurate water-balance measurements in the seasonal, snow-dominated Sierra Nevada are important for forest and downstream water management. However, few sites in the southern Sierra offer detailed records of the spatial and temporal patterns of snowpack and soil-water storage and the fluxes affecting them, i.e., precipitation as rain and snow, snowmelt, evapotranspiration, and runoff. To explore these stores and fluxes we instrumented the Wolverton basin (2180–2750 m) in Sequoia National Park with distributed, continuous sensors. This 2006–2016 record of snow depth, soil moisture and soil temperature, and meteorological data quantifies the hydrologic inputs and storage in a mostly undeveloped catchment. Clustered sensors record lateral differences with regards to aspect and canopy cover at approximately 2250 and 2625 m in elevation, where two meteorological stations are installed. Meteorological stations record air temperature, relative humidity, radiation, precipitation, wind speed and direction, and snow depth. Data are available at hourly intervals by water year (1 October–30 September) in non-proprietary formats from online data repositories (https://doi.org/10.6071/M3S94T).
Highlights
The western slope of the Sierra Nevada, California, has an elevation-driven climate gradient where wintertime snowpack accumulation provides for a large part of California’s annual water needs
Sensor instruments were installed for air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction, net radiation, solar radiation, snow depth, and soil moisture and soil temperature
A 10-year meteorological and hydrologic data record is presented for a catchment in Sequoia National Park, in the southern Sierra Nevada
Summary
The western slope of the Sierra Nevada, California, has an elevation-driven climate gradient where wintertime snowpack accumulation provides for a large part of California’s annual water needs. A time-varying canopy parameter in snow modeling reduces errors by 7 days in the simulated snow disappearance date, and errors in the timing of soil-water fluxes by 11 days, on average, compared to a bulk parameterization of radiation transfer through the canopy (Kirchner et al, 2014) Studies of this basin indicate that it is sensitive to a changing climate. The timing and rate of snowmelt indicate that this elevation range is sensitive to seasonal meteorology, especially where upper elevations may begin to experience snow melt during more of the snow-covered season (Kirchner et al, 2014) At both the upper and lower sites, peak soil moisture precedes the average date of snow disappearance, meaning that soil moisture declines even while snowmelt is infiltrating into the soil system (Harpold et al, 2015). With peak snow depth around 3300 m (Kirchner et al, 2014), such changes to the hydrological system could have major implications for snowpack water storage and runoff
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