Changing snow water storage in natural snow reservoirs

Aragon, Christina Marie; Hill, David F.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-781-2024

Articles | Volume 28, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-781-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-781-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 28, issue 4

Research article

|

20 Feb 2024

Research article |

| 20 Feb 2024

Changing snow water storage in natural snow reservoirs

Christina Marie Aragon and David F. Hill

Data sets

Daily 4 km Gridded SWE and Snow Depth from Assimilated In-Situ and Modeled Data over the Conterminous US, Version 1 P. Broxton et al. https://doi.org/10.5067/0GGPB220EX6A

NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Global 1 arc second [Data set] NASA JPL https://doi.org/10.5067/MEaSUREs/SRTM/SRTMGL1.003

Short summary

A novel snow metric, snow water storage (SwS), is used to characterize the natural reservoir function of snowpacks, quantifying how much water is held in snow reservoirs and for how long. Despite covering only 16 % of US land area, mountainous regions contribute 72 % of the annual SwS. Recent decades show a 22 % decline in annual mountain SwS. Flexible snow metrics such as SwS may become more valuable for monitoring and predicting water resources amidst a future of increased climate variability.