Accurate knowledge on snow distribution in alpine terrain is crucial for various applications such as flood risk assessment, avalanche warning or managing water supply and hydro-power. To simulate the seasonal snow cover development in alpine terrain, the spatially distributed, physics-based model Alpine3D is suitable. The model is typically driven by spatial interpolations of observations from...

A study of the California Sierra Nevada snowpack has been conducted using snow station observations and reanalysis surface temperature data. First-of-the-month snow water equivalent (“SWE”) measurements were combined from two data sets to provide sufficient data from 1930 to 2007. The monthly snapshots are used to calculate peak snow mass timing for each snow season. Since 1930, there has been ...

[1] From imaging spectrometer data, we simultaneously estimate the abundance of the three phases of water in an environment that includes melting snow, basing the analysis on the spectral shift in the absorption coefficient between water vapor, liquid water, and ice at 940, 980, and 1030 nm respectively. We apply a spectral fitting algorithm that measures the expressed abundance of the three ph...

The Antarctic continent is among the most pristine regions; yet various organic contaminants have been measured there routinely. Air and snow samples were collected during the austral spring (October-November, 2010) along the western Antarctic Peninsula and analyzed for organochlorine pesticides (OCPs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) to assess the re...

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the use of polarimetric observations in a radar-based winter hydrometeor classification algorithm. This is accomplished by deriving bulk electromagnetic scattering properties of stratiform, cold-season rain, freezing rain, sleet, dry aggregated snowflakes, dendritic snow crystals, and platelike snow crystals at X-, C-, and S-band wavelengths based on ...

Jökulhlaup (glacial outburst floods) are caused by subglacial geothermal activity melting overlying ice, or by draining of ice-dammed lakes. They pose a recurring hazard along Iceland’s south coast where volcano-glacial interactions create often unpredictable, high-magnitude floods. Gathering information about past floods is crucial for projecting findings to present day scenarios and developin...

Among the many challenges of Alpine flood prediction is describing complex, meteo-hydrological processes in a simplified, robust manner that can be easily integrated into operational forecasting. In this dissertation, improved methods to characterize these processes are developed and integrated into the hydrological modeling component of an operational flood forecasting system used in the Swiss...