15.1 INTRODUCTION Snow cover is an important earth surface characteristic because it influences partitioning of the surface radiation, energy, and hydrologic budgets. Snow is also an important source of moisture for agricultural crops and water supply in many higher latitude or mountainous areas. For instance, snowmelt provides approximately

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We have developed and tested a model to assess the hydrologic and biogeochemical responses of seasonally snow covered alpine areas to changes in inputs of water, chemicals, and energy. This alpine hydrochemical model (AHM) is capable of incorporating a detailed understanding of watershed processes in order to simulate events critical to biota such as the ionic pulse associated with spring snowm...

[1] We examined the effects of snow, event size, basin size, and forest harvest on floods using >1000 peak discharge events from 1953 to 2006 from three small (<1 km), paired‐watershed forest‐harvest experiments and six large (60–600 km) basins spanning the transient (400–800 m) and seasonal (>800 m) snow zones in the western Cascades of Oregon. Retrospectively classified rain‐on‐snow events de...

Accurate prediction of available water supply from snowmelt is needed if the myriad of human, environmental, agricultural, and industrial demands for water are to be satisfied, especially given legislatively imposed conditions on its allocation. Robust retrievals of hydrologic basin model variables (e.g., insolation or areal extent of snow cover) provide several advantages over the current oper...

In many parts of the world, snowmelt energetics are dominated by solar irradiance. This is particularly the case in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, where clear skies dominate the winter and spring. In mountains, solar irradiance at the snow surface is not only affected by solar angles, atmospheric transmittance, and the slope and aspect of immediate topography but also by shadows from surrounding...

Climate change scenarios for northern boreal regions indicate that there will be increasing temperature and precipitation, and the changes are expected to be larger in winter than in summer. These precipitation and discharge patterns, coupled with shorter ice cover/soil frost periods in the future would be expected to contribute significantly to changing flow paths of organic matter over a rang...

We investigated the e€ect of increasing spatial and temporal resolutions on modelled distributions of snow water equivalence (SWE) and snowmelt in the Emerald Lake Watershed (ELW) of the Sierra Nevada of California, USA. We used a coupled remote sensing/distributed energy balance snowmelt model (SNODIS), and used previously validated results from a high spatial (30 m) and temporal (hourly) reso...