Articles | Volume 28, issue 4
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-781-2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-781-2024
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

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Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 25, 4651–4680, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-4651-2021,https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-4651-2021, 2021
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Subject: Snow and Ice | Techniques and Approaches: Theory development
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Cited articles

Barnett, T. P., Adam, J. C., and Lettenmaier, D. P.: Potential impacts of a warming climate on water availability in snow-dominated regions, Nature, 438, 303–309, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04141, 2005. a, b
Blöschl, G. and Sivapalan, M.: Scale issues in hydrological modelling: A review, Hydrol. Process., 9, 251–290, https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.3360090305, 1995. a
Boon, S.: Snow accumulation and ablation in a beetle-killed pine stand in Northern Interior British Columbia, J. Ecosyst. Manage., 8, 1–13, https://doi.org/10.22230/jem.2007v8n3a369, 2007. a
Bormann, K. J., Brown, R. D., Derksen, C., and Painter, T. H.: Estimating snow-cover trends from space, Nat. Clim. Change, 8, 924–928, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0318-3, 2018. a
Broxton, P., Zeng, X., and Dawson, N.: Daily 4 km Gridded SWE and Snow Depth from Assimilated In-Situ and Modeled Data over the Conterminous US, Version 1, NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center [data set], https://doi.org/10.5067/0GGPB220EX6A, 2019. a, b
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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.