Dust deposition to mountain snow cover, which has increased since the late 19(th) century, accelerates the rate of snowmelt by increasing the solar radiation absorbed by the snowpack. Snowmelt occurs earlier, but is decoupled from seasonal warming. Climate warming advances the timing of snowmelt and early season phenological events (e.g., the onset of greening and flowering); however, earlier s...

Two alpine-snowbed shrubs, Phyllodoce caerulea and P. aleutica (Ericaceae), co-occur in locales in northern Japan with early to late snowmelt, but they have different mating systems. Phyllodoce caerulea is an obligate outcrosser in any population, whereas the selfing ability of P. aleutica is highly variable among neighboring populations along snowmelt gradients: it shows high self-compatibilit...

[1] The O/O ratio of snowmelt from a seasonal snowpack typically increases with time as the melting process progresses. This temporal evolution is caused by isotopic exchange between liquid and ice as meltwater percolates down the snow column. Consequently, hydrograph separations of spring runoff using the bulk snow composition as the new water end-member will be erroneous. Accurate determinati...

[1] We used remotely sensed snow cover data and a physically based snowmelt model to estimate the spatial distribution of energy fluxes, snowmelt, snow water equivalent, and snow cover extent over the different land cover types within the Green Lakes Valley, Front Range, Colorado. The spatially explicit snowpack model was coupled to the Alpine Hydrochemical Model (AHM), and estimates of hydroch...

Understanding how spring runoff is generated in East Siberia during the spring thaw is important to predicting river flows. To evaluate the snowmelt runoff generated, a simple runoff model was developed. The model involves processes of water and energy balance within the snowpack and energy balance within soil, snowmelt infiltration into the frozen ground, and surface runoff. The model reproduc...

Discharge events induced by mixture of snowmelt and rainfall are strongly nonlinear due to consequences of rain-on-snow phenomena and snowmelt dependence on energy balance. However, they received relatively little attention, especially in high-resolution discharge forecasting. In this study, we use Random Forests models for 24 h discharge forecasting in 1 h resolution in a 105.9 km2 urbanized c...

River water quality was evaluated with respect to eutrophication and land use during spring snowmelt and summer base flow periods in Abashiri (mixed cropland-livestock farming) and Okoppe (grassland-based dairy cattle farming), eastern Hokkaido, Japan. Water from rivers and tributaries was sampled during snowmelt and summer base flow periods in 2005, and river flow was measured. Total N (TN), N...

The terrestrial water cycle contains large uncertainties that impact our understanding of water budgets and climate dynamics. Water storage is a key uncertainty in the boreal water budget, with tree water storage often ignored. The goal of this study is to quantify tree water content during the snowmelt and growing season periods for Alaskan and western Canadian boreal forests. Deciduous trees ...

To understand the regional impact of the atmospheric aerosols on the surface energy and water cycle in the southern Sierra Nevada characterized by extreme variations in terrain elevation, the authors examine the aerosol radiative forcing on surface insolation and snowmelt for the spring of 1998 in a regional climate model experiment. With a prescribed aerosol optical thickness of 0.2, it is fou...

[1] The distribution of snow and the energy flux components of snowmelt are intrinsic characteristics of the alpine water cycle controlling the location of source waters and the effect of climate on streamflow. Interannual variability of these characteristics is relevant to the effect of climate change on alpine hydrology. Our objective is to characterize the interannual variability in the spat...