A local to regional assessment of transported snow during snow storms or subsequent periods of strong winds is a prerequisite to reliably predict avalanche danger. Despite the fact that it has received continuing attention for decades, the problem of quantifying snow transport persists. Systems from point measurements to full three-dimensional simulations are in operation but all have their res...

Using new, daily cloud-free snow-cover products, this study examines snow cover dynamics and their response to climate change. The results demonstrate that the daily cloud-free snow-cover products not only posses the advantages of the AMSR-E (unaffected by weather conditions) and MODIS (relatively higher resolution) products, but are also characterized by high snow and overall classification ac...

Snow monitoring is essential for prediction of flooding due to rapid snowmelt, to provide snow avalanche risk forecasts and for water resource management – including hydropower production, agriculture, groundwater and drinking water. Sentinel-1 C-band SAR is sensitive to presence of wet snow and can be used to binary snow-wetness classification. Wet-snow mapping into more categories has been de...

Current snowmelt parameterisation schemes are largely untested in warmer maritime snowfields, where physical snow properties can differ substantially from the more common colder snow environments. Physical properties such as snow density influence the thermal properties of snow layers and are likely to be important for snowmelt rates. Existing methods for incorporating physical snow properties ...

Meltwater discharge and electrical conductivity were measured in eight 1 3 1 m lysimeters, and snow accumulation and electrical conductivity of melted samples were measured in snow pits during four snowmelt seasons at Mammoth Mountain, California. The peak snow-water equivalent ranged from 0.57 to 2.92 m over the four melt seasons. Lysimeter discharges ranged from 20% to 205% of the mean flow; ...

Introduction Knowledge of snow parameters is important for climatology, meteorology, hydrology, flood prevention and hydropower industry. Liquid water in a snow pack shows a dominant effect on reflection, absorption and transmission of electromagnetic waves especially in microwave region. Liquid water in snow plays a major role in metamorphism, mechanics and hydrology of snow, and in soil engin...

This paper compares and integrates different strategies to characterize the variability of end-of-winter snow depth and its relationship to topography in ice-wedge polygon tundra of Arctic Alaska. Snow depth was measured using in situ snow depth probes and estimated using groundpenetrating radar (GPR) surveys and the photogrammetric detection and ranging (phodar) technique with an unmanned aeri...

Snow cover is one of the most important variables affecting agriculture, hydrology, and climate, but detailed measurements are not widely available. Therefore, the effectiveness and validity of snow schemes in general circulation models have been difficult to assess. Using long-term snow cover data from the former Soviet Union, this paper focuses on the validation of the snow submodel in the Bi...

Runo€ in glacierized alpine basins results from both seasonal snow cover and glacier melt. In this paper we present a case study for an improved runo€ modelling of the basin Massa-Blatten, 196 km, 1447±4191 m a.s.l. Using high resolution satellite sensors, it is possible to separately map snow cover and glacier areas. From the satellite data we derive depletion curves of snow covered areas in s...

Reasonably simple yet realistic modelling schemes simulating the heat and mass balance within a snow pack are required to provide the necessary boundary conditions for meteorological and hydrological models. An improvement to a one-layer snow energy balance model (UEB, Tarboton et al., 1995) is proposed to better simulate snow surface and snow pack temperatures and, as a result, snowmelt. The m...