Identification

Title

Modeling the influence of hypsometry, vegetation, and storm energy on snowmelt contributions to basins during rain-on-snow floods

Abstract

Point observations and previous basin modeling efforts have suggested that snowmelt may be a significant input of water for runoff during extreme rain-on-snow floods within western U.S. basins. Quantifying snowmelt input over entire basins is difficult given sparse observations of snowmelt. In order to provide a range of snowmelt contributions for water managers, a physically based snow model coupled with an idealized basin representation was evaluated in point simulations and used to quantify the maximum basin-wide input from snowmelt volume during flood events. Maximum snowmelt basin contributions and uncertainty ranges were estimated as 29% (11-47%), 29% (8-37%), and 7% (2-24%) of total rain plus snowmelt input, within the Snoqualmie, East North Fork Feather, and Upper San Joaquin basins, respectively, during historic flooding events between 1980 and 2008. The idealized basin representation revealed that both hypsometry and forest cover of a basin had similar magnitude of impacts on the basin-wide snowmelt totals. However, the characteristics of a given storm (antecedent SWE and available energy for melt) controlled how much hypsometry and forest cover impacted basin-wide snowmelt. These results indicate that for watershed managers, flood forecasting efforts should prioritize rainfall prediction first, but cannot neglect snowmelt contributions in some cases. Efforts to reduce the uncertainty in the above snowmelt simulations should focus on improving the meteorological forcing data (especially air temperature and wind speed) in complex terrain.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7vx0j0t

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2015-10-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact