Nearly 40 million residents of California depend on streamflow that originates from the mountain snowpack. Over the last two decades, the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the drinking water, agricultural water, and hydroelectric power ...

Operational water-resource planning faces an increased challenge with a changing seasonal snowpack in mountain watersheds due to global and local climatological factors. An example region is the Western United States, where there is a demonstrated ...

Recent advancements in remote sensing of snow (e.g., lidar) have allowed for the characterization of mountain snowpacks at higher spatial resolutions (< 10-m), with higher vertical accuracy (< 20-cm), and covering entire catchments repeatedly throughout ...

Changes in rain/snowfall apportionments are already being observed in mountain environments because of climate change. Increases in temperatures are leading to the displacement of rain-snow transition zones towards higher elevations, and are impacting snowpack storage, ...

The rain-snow transition zone in the western mountains of the United States is hydrologically sensitive to small atmospheric changes because temperatures often hover near the freezing point of water, potentially changing the snow fraction of ...

The mountains across the western United States are among the many regions around the world that are experiencing a shift in snow extent and snowmelt timing due to changing global climatological and local factors, such ...

Rain-on-snow events in headwater catchments often cause catastrophic downstream floods. Other times, large rainfall events over snow fail to trigger even slight snowmelt, thus making accurate streamflow prediction extremely important for reservoir managers. Previous studies ...

Snow dominated watersheds drive western USA water supply and are increasingly important as climate change affects snowmelt timing. This study investigates the inter- and intra-annual consistency in snow depth distribution from Light Detection and Ranging ...

Modeling snow accumulation and melt is important for determining how watersheds that span the rain-to-snow transition zone will respond to changes in climate. The spatial distribution of snow cover as well as the timing and ...

Snow science and modeling are in transition from interpolation of point samples to high resolution spatial measurement of snow properties from airborne and ground-based Lidar (ALS and TLS), digital photogrammetry and ground penetrating radar (GPR). ...

Although precipitation/snowfall are a first order control on the spatial distribution of snow at the onset of melt, standard precipitation interpolation methods usually result in a relatively homogeneous snow cover. A recent approach to address ...

The USDA Agricultural Research Service is involved in a technology transfer project to enhance water supply management in the Western US through the application of a snow modeling system. Cloud services are readily attainable by ...

Snow provides fresh meltwater to over a billion people worldwide. Snow dominated watersheds drive western US water supply and are increasingly important as demand depletes reservoir and groundwater recharge capabilities. This motivates our inter- and ...