Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
8866511 | Remote Sensing of Environment | 2018 | 12 Pages |
Abstract
The snowcover indices captured the relative differences in surface observations of snow presence and absence between exposed and sheltered sites on an intensely instrumented ridge in the Canadian Rockies Hydrological Observatory. Within the Tuolumne River Basin in central California (1100â¯km2), the SP index captured roughly half of the spatial variability (R2â¯=â¯0.49 to 0.56) in peak SWE as estimated from airborne LiDAR-derived snow depths. At the individual mountain ridge scale (~800â¯m), variability in both ablation and snow redistribution controlled the SP patterns over 7979 ridges. Differences in shortwave irradiance explained 76% of the SP variance across ridges, but could not explain smaller-scale (~100â¯m) SP peaks that are associated with snowdrifts and avalanche deposits. The snowcover indices can be used to evaluate snow redistribution models of the finer scale impacts of snow redistribution by wind and gravity as long as the larger scale influences of spatially variable solar irradiance effects are also simulated.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Earth and Planetary Sciences
Computers in Earth Sciences
Authors
Nicholas E. Wayand, Christopher B. Marsh, Joseph M. Shea, John W. Pomeroy,