Snowpack Measurement Variability Across the Lago Escondido and Lake

Snowpack is highly variable across different scales of terrain and with changing land cover. Previous research has used various terrain properties, such as elevation, slope, aspect, northness, occasionally at different resolutions, to estimate the distribution of snowpack properties. Snow depth is among the easiest snowpack properties to measure, and average values are used to determine the spatial distribution of snow. Here we investigate the variability of snow depth for two watersheds on Byers Peninsula of Livingston Island in the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica by taking multiple measurements to represent a single point. We use several techniques to quantify variability and show that scaling is more crucial with some quantification methods than with others. We can use the preferred methods to determine the resolution of future sampling strategies. 1 M. Toro. Área de Medio Ambiente Hídrico, Centro de Estudios Hidrográficos (CEDEX), 28005 Madrid, Spain