Articles | Volume 20, issue 6
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-3345-2026
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-3345-2026
Research article
 | 
10 Jun 2026
Research article |  | 10 Jun 2026

Assessing the impact of meteorological forcing and its uncertainty on snow modeling and reanalysis

Haorui Sun and Steven A. Margulis

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Cited articles

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Broxton, P. D., Zeng, X., and Dawson, N.: Why Do Global Reanalyses and Land Data Assimilation Products Underestimate Snow Water Equivalent?, J. Hydrometeorol., 17, 2743–2761, https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-16-0056.1, 2016. 
Cazorzi, F. and Dalla Fontana, G.: Snowmelt modelling by combining air temperature and a distributed radiation index, J. Hydrol., 181, 169–187, https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1694(95)02913-3, 1996. 
Clark, M. P., Kavetski, D., and Fenicia, F.: Pursuing the method of multiple working hypotheses for hydrological modeling, Water Resour. Res., 47, 2010WR009827, https://doi.org/10.1029/2010WR009827, 2011. 
Cortés, G. and Margulis, S.: Impacts of El Niño and La Niña on interannual snow accumulation in the Andes: Results from a high-resolution 31 year reanalysis, Geophys. Res. Lett., 44, 6859–6867, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL073826, 2017. 
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Short summary
Estimating Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) has large uncertainties from meteorological data, with no single dataset being universally superior. Our multi-forcing approach, which combines datasets, yields more accurate SWE estimates than single-forcing methods by mitigating bias. Even after data assimilation corrects for prior errors, the multi-forcing ensemble improves accuracy and uncertainty characterization, offering a more robust and reliable strategy for water resource management.
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