Articles | Volume 16, issue 9
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-3469-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-3469-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Research article
| 
01 Sep 2022
Research article |
| 01 Sep 2022
| 01 Sep 2022
Natural climate variability is an important aspect of future projections of snow water resources and rain-on-snow events
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, 8903
Birmensdorf, Switzerland
WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, 7260 Davos,
Switzerland
Adam Winstral
WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, 7260 Davos,
Switzerland
deceased, March 2021
Tobias Jonas
WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, 7260 Davos,
Switzerland
Paolo Burlando
Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich,
Switzerland
Nadav Peleg
Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich,
Switzerland
Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, University of Lausanne, 1015
Lausanne, Switzerland
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Snow depth observations at high spatial resolution from the Sentinel-1 satellite mission are presented over the European Alps. The novel observations can improve our knowledge of seasonal snow mass in areas with complex topography, where satellite-based estimates are currently lacking, and benefit a number of applications including water resource management, flood forecasting, and numerical weather prediction.
Nora Helbig, Michael Schirmer, Jan Magnusson, Flavia Mäder, Alec van Herwijnen, Louis Quéno, Yves Bühler, Jeff S. Deems, and Simon Gascoin
The Cryosphere, 15, 4607–4624, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-4607-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-4607-2021, 2021
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The spatial variability in snow depth in mountains is driven by interactions between topography, wind, precipitation and radiation. In applications such as weather, climate and hydrological predictions, this is accounted for by the fractional snow-covered area describing the fraction of the ground surface covered by snow. We developed a new description for model grid cell sizes larger than 200 m. An evaluation suggests that the description performs similarly well in most geographical regions.
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Short summary
Rain is highly variable in time at a given location so that there can be both wet and dry climate periods. In this study, we quantify the effects of this natural climate variability and other sources of uncertainty on changes in flooding events due to rain on snow (ROS) caused by climate change. For ROS events with a significant contribution of snowmelt to runoff, the change due to climate was too small to draw firm conclusions about whether there are more ROS events of this important type.
Rain is highly variable in time at a given location so that there can be both wet and dry...
