Abstract
We evaluated the feasibility for operational snow drought monitoring over Europe based on the near-real-time snow water equivalent (SWE) satellite product from the EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H-SAF). To do so, the consistency of this dataset with the consolidated dataset of the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC), as well as with the ERA5 reanalysis dataset from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, was tested in terms of both spatial snow coverage and detection of anomalies from the long-term climatology. The analysis confirms a general good agreement among the three products as well as substantial differences over mountainous terrains, with the H-SAF product capturing only about 30% of the areas identified by CMC as snow-covered in those areas, while a better match between the ERA5 and the CMC spatial coverage is observed. However, significant inconsistencies in the correlation between all three SWE anomalies are observed over mountain areas. Due to the lack of a reliable reference dataset, the observed inconsistencies and the coarse spatial resolution (0.25 deg) of all three products limit the possibility for snow drought monitoring over key European regions such as the Alps.
Highlights
The concept of snow drought, as the manifestation of reduced water storage in the form of snow, has appeared in the scientific literature since the late seventies and early eighties
The temporal consistency of the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) snow water equivalent (SWE) grid data is summarized in Fig. 1, where the number of years (Ns) with SWE > 10 mm is depicted for each month in the CMC snow season
The H-SAF SWE satellite product has been tested for its potential use for operational snow drought monitoring over Europe by comparing its near-real time, monthly aggregated SWE anomaly maps against the CMC consolidated datasets and the outputs of the nearreal-time European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 reanalysis
Summary
The concept of snow drought, as the manifestation of reduced water storage in the form of snow, has appeared in the scientific literature since the late seventies and early eighties. Climate change studies on past trends[4,5] and future projections[6,7] of snow storage emphasize the increasing importance of snow for the hydrological balance of several snow-dominated water basins.[8] Following the US West coast winter drought of 2015, a new classification of snow drought was proposed, which differentiates between “dry snow drought,” caused by a lack of winter precipitation as snow, and “warm snow drought,” associated with a lack of snow accumulation even during normal winter precipitation due to high temperatures.[9] Similar mechanisms were observed for snow droughts over Austria and Norway,[10] where unusual high temperatures and/or low precipitation conditions may play different roles in the lack of snow This distinction has several practical implications for water managers, who have to deal with reduced streamflow over the entire year in the case of dry snow drought or early melting in the case of warm snow drought that can lead to winter floods followed by spring/summer droughts.
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